Boagworld

News and events | Hiring new staff | Christian Heilmann on common Javascript mistakes | Listener emails

A quick request. We are really in need of some more transcribers to help with the interviews we do every week. The team we have are doing an amazing job but it would be great to spread the load.

If you feel you could help once in a while please drop me an email and I will add you to the list.

News and events

Highly extensible CSS

A while back Cameron Moll released a tantalising screencast of a seminar he was running on Highly extensible CSS. Website today need to be ultra-flexible, dealing with changing content, multiple devices, and user customisation. Cameron’s presentation aimed to teach designers and developers how to build interfaces capable of adapting to the unforeseen.

Unfortunately, I didn’t get the opportunity to attend. I was therefore excited to discover that Cameron is about to cover the same subject in a series of four posts on his website, all for free!

So far he has only posted the introduction. However I am really looking forward to the whole series. For now just check out the screencast and see if it excites you as much as it did me…

Video tools

Talking of screen casts I have actually been working on several myself at the moment. We are in the process of redeveloping the Headscape website and have decided to include a couple of demonstrations and presentations.

This means I have been in research mode and I thought I would share what I have found. Firstly, I have discovered a great screencasting tool called Screen Flow. This Leopard only software stands head and shoulders above anything else I have tried on either Windows or the Mac. It is amazingly easy to record and edit your screencast and has some great built in effects. My favourite feature is that it will capture from both a web cam and the screen at the same time. This allows you to cut between video and the screen or even overlay a video feed on top of the cast.

Once I had recorded my video I started to look for somewhere to host it. Although I would be foolish not to put it on Youtube where it will get the most exposure, I didn’t want to use Youtube when embedding on my site. The quality on YouTube is poor and you are limited over length and size. With this in mind I looked at a number of competitors. The winner for me turned out to be Vimeo. The quality is superb, they are much more flexible over length and time, but most of all they provide links to the original file and allow you to customise the interface.

So, if you are looking to create a screencast I highly recommend Screen Flow and Vimeo. Also, if you are looking for tips on how to make an engaging video then check out Ryan Caron’s tips over at Carsonified.

Microformat boost

The last thing I want to mention in this week’s news segment is the growing interest we are seeing in Microformats recently.

For a start Firefox 3 is going to have built in support for Microformats, which will be hugely significant in itself. However the guys over at Yahoo! are doing some interesting stuff in the area too. Yahoo! Micro Search is a new way of viewing search results that include all kinds of metadata including microformats. According to David Peterson at Sitepoint this could allow Yahoo to really challenge Google.

I am not sure whether that is true or not, but I do know it is a great time to start using Microformats. If you want to get started then check out Microformats.org or for you more advanced users have a look at this interesting demo of compound Microformats.

Feature: Hiring new staff

Marcus shares his thoughts about taking on web design staff for the first time.

Expert interview: Christian Heilmann on common Javascript mistakes

Paul: As I said at the beginning of the show, joining me today is Christian Heilmann. Hello Christian, how are you?

Christian: Hello Paul. Why it’s quite fun cause it’s Valentines day & I’m stuck with you as a date.

Paul: Well I’m sorry that you had to ah to endure me on Valentines Day but I’m sure you’ll survive. And um yeah… so basically, the reason that we’ve got you on the show today is we want to talk a little bit, a little bit about javascript. Now we’ve talked a lot of times about javascript before and it’s not a new subject, but I kind-of um… felt it would be worth touching on the kind-of common mistakes that we’re seeing a lot in the world of javascript at the moment. I think um… you know obviously javascript is very in and there’s load of cool stuff being done with it but not always in the wisest ways. Um… and then on top of that, so there’s this kind-of group of people that are doing quite advanced stuff with javascript with maybe not considering all the ramifications of what they’re doing. And there’s another kind-of group of people which are people like myself that go ‘Ewww… look at that, that’s cool I want to start doing things like that.’ And so you know a little, a little knowledge is dangerous as they say, and you know we’ve picked up books like Jeremy Keith’s scripting book and read that and now we think that we can, we can build javascript applications and are kind-of hacking things together. So I thought lets spend a few minutes looking at those, those kinds of issues. So um um… maybe probably a good place to start off if you don’t mind Christian is what advice you’d give to somebody starting to learn javascript so that, so that they kind of avoid some of these mistakes you know from the get go. What good principals, good foundations should they be working on?

Christian: Um… the main foundation is that javascript is a language in its own rights. It’s uh uh… you can not take any other knowledge and try to apply it on to javascript and this is where the two angles actually come where people that come from a higher programming language background trying to find the same principals that apply there inside javascript

Paul: Um hum…

Christian: Or people that come from CSS design background, basically think that it’s as easy as applying a CSS selector to an element that everything will be matched magically…

Paul: Yeah…

Christian: … and not realizing that there is an impact on speed and an impact on how the browser actually finds these things and what kind of mistakes the browser does. The main thing to remember about javascript is ah… there are many different ways of javascript, there are many different environments where it’s applied. So there is lots of really clever things being done right now with javascript, even on the service side and inside frameworks and inside API’s. But there’s also, in the end you would run it in a browser sooner or later. And if that’s where you are going to work the best advice is actually to not trust javascript ever and to actually um… enhance with it but not really rely on it.

Paul: Um hum…

Christian: So if there is a window print link, then this link should be generated with javascript and not just be an ‘href’ javascript window print because if somebody doesn’t have javascript or for some reason javascript’s broke, or the engine doesn’t work in your environment then you click the button and nothing happens. And there’s nothing worse than uh promising an end user something that you don’t deliver in the end.

Paul: Yeah.

Christian: The other thing is that uh… when you start from javascript, one of the first things to remember is that you should always learn the if statements and learn that they’re your best friend. Like never do: ‘apply something’ BUT IF ‘something’ THEN ‘apply something’. So if you…

Paul: Umm…

Christian: Try to access a heading with an ID for example, and then you don’t just do: HEADING ID ‘something’ = ‘something’… cause it might not be there.

Paul: Yeah.

Christian: So basically test for it, before you apply it. When you follow this principle through with all of your programming, this kind of defensive programming, then you will (we will) definitely write good javascript in any programming language really. Over the years when you get more and more experience you just learn more and more ways how the technology that you use fails…

Paul: Mmm…

Christian: …rather than actually succeeds. So you learn how to avoid the biggest pitfalls.

Paul: I mean, you always hear this thing don’t you about um… that not all browsers support javascript or that not all users have javascript turned on. I mean how real a problem is that? Is that being overly cautious to worry too much about that kind of thing or is it a real problem? Are there actually a lot of users out there that… that don’t have javascript for one reason or another?

Christian: It’s impossible to say. Its statistics and it’s a bit like flash. When you when you look at flash statistics and you hear like a 99% have it enabled on the Adobe side, then you’re like ‘Oh yeah really.’ because these are the only stats that you find…

Paul: Um hum…

Christian: …the company that delivers that is a bit like… yeah, I think that the Microsoft help pages with have a lot of hits from people with Windows.

Paul: Yeah.

Christian: So um… it’s not really a problem I don’t see the problem at all. I see the problem of people… uh, architecting and designing applications around the premise that javascript will be there, and everything will be happy and work.

Paul: Mmm hmm…

Christian: If you write your applications like javascript does not need to be there, but is nice when it’s there and actually makes it a lot smoother, then you don’t have a problem…

Paul: Mmm…

Christian: I don’t buy this whole argument of like… oh AJAX is so cool because we don’t’ have much traffic on our servers any longer. It’s like yeah, but you never know the environment that javascript is run in. It could…

Paul: Mmm…

Christian: …my mobile phone, it could be it could be an iPhone, it could be it could be an old browser. I just bought myself this eeePC that doesn’t have much memory. It’s uh… you can never expect the end user to actually cater their hardware to your needs…

Paul: Mmm…

Christian: So it’s pretty… it’s pretty unsafe to actually rely on it. So even if the statistics are ridiculously low, it doesn’t really matter because you don’t want to deliver a bad practice and deliver a bad experience to users.

Paul: Mmm…

Christian: And then there’s, of course, the SEO problems as well. If you have a navigation that’s dependent on javascript and doesn’t show anything – or you make elements clickable that shouldn’t be clickable, then you won’t have search engine spiders following these links and your sites won’t be indexed.

Paul: Mmm…

Christian: Same with accessibility. When you make something clickable that is not clickable by default, like a ‘span’ or a ‘div’ or whatever, then you can not expect a user agent actually to allow people with assistive technology or people that use a keyboard to use the same application because browsers are just not clever enough for that.

Paul: Mmm. So what about people, um… starting out as absolute beginners – what are the most common mistakes you’re seeing them make when they start out doing javascript?

Christian: A lot is copy and pasting and hoping that nothing breaks…

Paul: (Laughs)

Christian: …and ah… also um… a lot of it is skimming tutorials. A good tutorial writer will tell you a lot in the paragraphs between the code examples.

Paul: Mmm.

Christian: And um… just going through the code examples and trying to figure out what’s going there yourself and copy and pasting it does not really make you a good developer. This information was put there for a reason and actually explains you the smaller bits that you need to know about the language. ‘Cause most of the javascript errors that actually happen in the real world is not because you did a coding mistake, but because you made an application mistake that you expected a browser to do something. Or you expected an application to give you the right information back, where as you didn’t test for it. So um… I think trusting tutorials and uh… just copy and pasting code without actually knowing what it does is a very dangerous thing.

Paul: Mmm… Would you apply that same principal to frameworks? You know and not under… if you don’t understand what a framework is doing then it is probably best to avoid it.

Christian: Well it’s a matter of what it does. I mean uh… the last few years in web development have become a lot more transparent than before and that’s… Firebug is actually to blame for that.

Paul: Mmm…

Christian: It’s great because you can look at code that is generated by javascript or a backend application and you always know, you can always analyze the whole document ñ what’s doing on there if you know your Firebug. That’s another thing that I would actually tell any developer that would start with javascript to get his head around it’s like java… uh… Firebug is a great great way to learn from other people’s mistakes and also to monitor what’s going on in your scripts all the time. When it comes to library’s, that’s a bit of a different story because um… I had a bit of foot in mouth moment there when I proclaimed in the past that most library’s are bloated and unnecessary and um… now I am part of a library…

Paul: (Laughs)

Christian: …and uh I’m also I also talked to media AJAX to a lot of library developers and I realized that all the libraries do the same thing. All of them actually make the pain and the uncertainty that is browsers out there bearable for you.

Paul: Mmm.

Christian: So um… if you don’t understand what the source code of jQuery is, or the source code of the YUI is that does not mean that you shouldn’t use it.

Paul: Okay.

Christian: Other people have had that problem before you and loads and loads of people find bugs and submit bugs and help these libraries get better. So now a days if you are a new javascript developer I would basically say that you have learn the syntax, you have to learn the standards like what does DOM scripting mean, how does event handling work – but by all means if you go into a production please please use a library.

Paul: Oh okay.

Christian: Because that one take the cruft of all the fixing and uh… hacking that you have to do to make something work away from you.

Paul: Mmm.

Christian: It’s a matter of what you do. I mean if you’re doing a high traffic Twitter clone, or whatever, that runs an error application then you might have to these fixes – but you’re not necessarily going to do that as a new beginner.

Paul: Okay yeah… that that’s a very different opinion than I’ve heard in the past and it’s quite interesting to hear the other side of the argument. It’s good. So what about… what about dangerous people like me? So you know… where I knew nothing about javascript but I decided: ‘Yeah, I really need to learn this’. So I got a couple of books, I’ve read a couple of books and I’m kind of up and running but I’m not… you know I’m not a developer. I’m not somebody that’s an expert. You know… what other kind of common screwups you’ve seen people like me make?

Christian: Um… It’s tricky to say. It’s like most of the time, what these kind of people do is also try to solve problems that other technologies have with javascript.

Paul: Mmm…

Christian: Which is sometimes cool, but sometimes it’s also thinking about there’s a reason why that doesn’t work. So um… I mean the classic is… the classic is like rounded corners and things like that. There are loads of javascript rounded corner solutions which on the outskirt look like they are really clean solutions. This is also might be to put a class on a ‘div’ and to put a bit of javascript in and then everything has rounded corners and there’s no harm done.

Paul: Mmm.

Christian: That the javascript needs to inject a lot of HTML and probably is slow doing so. It’s the other side of the story it’s uh… I think people like you, that are just enthusiastic about it and basically want do it are not necessarily savvy of the implications that it has.

Paul: Yeah.

Christian: So the uh… the information that we need there is that we need a lot more tutorials on um… how javascript impacts performance. And we are starting with that already in the development network and other people are doing that as well, but there are lots of mistakes being done as well there. The other problem that I see with people that have just started with javascript, is they apply… they find one solution, they find one library then they become the biggest fan of that library then everything else is rubbish.

Paul: (Laughs)

Christian: And uh… that is a very dangerous attitude as well because you will not be, you will in your career work for different clients that will use different libraries as well. So you shouldn’t make yourself dependent on only one but understand what the benefits of each of them are and where you should apply them.

Paul: Um huh.

Christian: And how they actually make your life easier, or how they make your life less easy, than another competing product. So the implications there is that a lot of people use these newer libraries, or newer ways of using javascript, to actually make javascript behave like their favorite language or their favorite technology. That’s why people went nuts with every javascript library came up with the CSS selectors.

Paul: Yeah.

Christian: And that’s great because now I can go fifty levels deep in my CSS selector and the javascript finds what’s in there. While this is already an indicator that your HTML is not necessarily good structure

Paul: (Laughs)

Christian: …and it also means that if you change your HTML in the future you also have to change that path, or if you don’t change that path then your javascript will break.

Paul: Yeah.

Christian: And a lot of libraries break silently as well. So instead of just getting the error in your face that you’ve basically screwed up, you will not know what’s going on and will wonder what’s going on.

Paul: Mmm.

Christian: And when that happens that’s normally when people, like you, fire up emails to the library developers and tell them that their product is rubbish.

Paul: (Laughs) Yeah… I can’t disagree with that. That’s the kind of thing that I’d do probably. Um… what about, I’ll tell you the one thing that I’ve come across is that… I’m kind of competent enough to write functions to do a lot of the things that I need to do. Nothing really complicated, I couldn’t build anything too sophisticated, but you know enough to get me by. But then as I’m kind of looking at other people and what they’re doing um… a lot of them are using object orientated type techniques in the code that they are writing. There’s me hacking away with little functions and there seems to be some transition across object orientated approach when you kinda hit a certain level… you know why, what’s the benefits of that? Why do people take that kind of approach?

Christian: (Laughs) Um… It’s been very beneficial in other languages, and other environments, especially when the environment is rather sophisticated.

Paul: Mmm.

Christian: Then ah… you seen for example action script. Action script has been as much as a hacky javascript. Yeah, look what I can do if I do it this way language and now with the Flex frameworks, and Adobe opening up more and more to the java world, um… it’s getting more and more into structured ways. And the structured ways are hard to understand for somebody who is not from that background.

Paul: Mmm.

Christian: And I can safely say that, I’m not myself. So I um… I have a lot of problems with like properly, or massive structures, and frameworks. But when you see people do proper action script, for example, or do Rhino applications for the server in javascript, or some of the things that are happening with javascript 2… that there is a reason for that and the reason for that is the scalability is just so much bigger.

Paul: Right.

Christian: It’s uh… basically you can extend an object and I can reuse a class and I don’t have to worry about that. It’s like I start building these little small components, all of them in themselves tested and unit tested, and I know they work. And then I can build a bigger application from them.

Paul: Mmm.

Christian: Basically without really needing to know to test these things ever again.

Paul: Yeah.

Christian: That’s how things like PEAR and PHP and Perl libraries work as well. It’s people extending these kind of already existing bits, and bobs, rather than starting from scratch every time.

Paul: Mmm hum.

Christian: Most of the time for the little web development things that we do like the AJAX form or the Constentina navigation that’s not necessarily needed, but when you write a library for example, and it grows, like YUI is growing or like jQuery is growing as well… then you need to adhere to these standards ’cause otherwise everyone will just submit their own code in forms that are just terrible.

Paul: Yeah.

Christian: And there’s not much magic to it. I mean I get annoyed when I see javascript guys going on stage and saying like: ‘Well guys, this is a function and when it’s an object it’s a method and…’ and why should I know this? Well you should know this because you need to communicate with other developers as well sooner or later.

Paul: Umm hmm.

Christian: And these people speak that lingo and rather than you having to explain yourself for 15 minutes you could communicate in 3 minutes.

Paul: Mmm.

Christian: And that gives you more time for lunch break.

Paul: (Laughs) …or drinking…

Christian: So the worlds of hard core programming and javascript are actually getting closer and closer and seeing some of the things that browser vendors come out with and some of the other software that builds on web technologies that is being built at the moment, I don’t think that we can actually rely on our being the cool cookie web developer anymore.

Paul: Mmm.

Christian: It’s a bit like we have to have broaden our horizons the same way that backend people have to broaden their horizons when it comes to using javascript, but you can only make someone understand your problems when you understand how they tick.

Paul: Mmm.

Christian: Otherwise you start preaching to the choir.

Paul: Yeah. Okay here’s the last question to wrap up with. I’m going to open it up and let you rant uncontrollably. What are the worst mistakes that you’re seeing at the moment made with javascript, just generally.

Christian: Uh. The worst mistakes that I see are that people write little scripts for tasks over and over again.

Paul: Okay.

Christian: The same task and I see them actually tying the interface a lot to the javascript. So…

Paul: What do you mean by that?

Christian: Instead of making a javascript that actually creates the things it needs, there will be HTML that is just not necessary where the is not javascript available.

Paul: Okay yeah.

Christian: So instead of starting with the proper HTML and CSS structure, you basically have this whole gumph of HTML because there’s the javascript to clean it up anyways.

Paul: Yeah.

Christian: So um… basically the main tip is you will never ever be able to replace a proper HTML structure. It doesn’t matter where technology is going because technology will go away from that sooner or later, but at least a human could actually go there and see that there is a structure.

Paul: Mmm hum.

Christian: And that there’s a way to convert this to something better in a second step. If you’ve created a lot of spaghetti code with like HTML and javascript mixed in and lots of little scripts in there, then you will never be able to convert that to something better in the future and this is what we’ve been running in circles for years and years. We’ve never been improving things, we’ve just been fixing things and adding little bits, and bobs, to it.

Paul: (Laughs)

Christian: The other thing that I keeps seeing is well the fan boy thing, about javascript libraries and of the academic way of some people measuring javascript. You have all these like, I mean there’s people that spend like weeks finding different javascript includes and script libraries and measuring how fast they are on their computer…

Paul: (Laughs)

Christian: …generating twelve thousand objects and trying to put them on dominoes. Show me the application that needs that done, then your comparison actually makes sense.

Paul: Yeah.

Christian: It’s the same as CSS. You have like ’10 Most CSS Tricks That You Never Knew’ or ’10 Most Beautiful Naviagations’. It’s like list blog posts digging their way through the internet.

Paul: (Laughs)

Christian: And it’s the same way there right now, like I can appear immensely cleaver if I just put loads and loads of effort comparing things to each other. Instead of saying ‘this’ means use ‘that one for this one’ and ‘use that one for this one’ cause the benefits of that one library is ‘this’ and the benefits of the other library are ‘that’.

Paul: Yeah.

Christian: It normally is like, ‘Oh yeah… that library won.’ or ‘All of the others are bad’.

Paul: Yeah.

Christian: And that’s never the case.

Paul: Hmmm.

Christian: We have to get away from this putting things together randomly and making up an application, to a proper web application design and I’m going to be in New York at the end of the month, no actually beginning of next month at AJAX Worlds and my talk there will be about how to do javascript design and javascript architecture of big applications.

Paul: Mmm hmm.

Christian: That’s going to be quite interesting feedback from the audience I’m quite sure about this, but it’s a matter that we grow up, we actually have to grow up as web developers and take our stuff serious and actually make sure that we don’t build for ourselves – but we build for the guy that comes after us cause that will always happen as well.

Paul: Yeah… and that’s really good advice.

Christian: If you think like that, then you will never write bad code and sometimes people just have to suffer that themselves before they start doing it.

Paul: Mmm.

Christian: It’s always clever to think of yourself as the javascript god that can do things better anyways, but some times it’s good to leave your superhero skills in the corner and just do something that works and that’s understandable and spend some time documenting for the next guy that has to take it over from you.

Paul: And I think that applies to everybody you know people, even people doing HTML or CSS or server side stuff thinking about the next person is, yeah, hugely important.

Christian: Yeah.

Paul: Thank you so much Christian. That was very useful and I really appreciate you taking the time to come on the show on Valentine’s of all days. Good to talk to you Christian and we’ll speak soon.

Christian: See you soon. Bye.

Listeners email:

Rolling out new features

Our first listener comment is from Alex who has come up with a clever little approach for educating existing users about new features…

I just listened to show 112, where you mentioned Christian Heilmann’s javascript walkthroughs. These walkthroughs reminded me that I wanted to do something similar for our website, except I wasn’t able to squeeze it in before the deadline.

My workplace decided on a total revamp of their website, and the final design had some substantial visual and navigational changes. Among other changes, disparate logins had been consolidated into one login button. Of course, now we had the problem of habitual users; because the website hadn’t changed for several years, how do we now try to avoid several hundred support calls asking where the logins have gone?

Well, the obvious solution is to not make such drastic changes. Going for evolution, not revolution and whatnot. Failing that, is something like Christian’s walkthrough popups. However, these would still show up for new users, for whom this information would prove totally useless.

Here’s the solution I had planned:

A couple weeks before the new site or feature launch, we use javascript to set a cookie. This accomplishes two things: 1) we target people who have javascript, so we know the popups will work for them, and 2) we’ll know they were at this page *before* we changed the design or added a feature. Now, once we launch, we check for that cookie using PHP (or other server-side scripting). Why do this on the server side? Well, it lets us avoid even inserting the popup code for people who don’t have the cookie. If the cookie exists, we can then delete the cookie (so they don’t see the walkthrough again), and then insert the walkthrough divs and javascript.

Even though I didn’t get a chance to implement it, maybe this will help other people prepare for site overhauls.

What a great idea Alex. Existing users rarely like sudden changes to the sites they use regularly and often need a lot of help making the transition. This is an excellent way of doing that without confusing new users with unnecessary information.

Content management and CSS

Our second listener contribution is a question from Adrian…

Thank you very much for the show – it has been so helpful!

I have been given the job of creating an Intranet site for a small business. After listening to your shows I would love to create this website using webstandards and have been learning CSS. As well as this it is important that the users of the site can modify the content via a CMS.

So my questions are; can both of these things be satisfied? Also is it possible to design the website using webstandards and then “plug” a CMS into the already created website?

It is definitely possible for content providers to update content built using CSS. In fact it is easier, and allows the designer to maintain more control over the design. Traditionally content providers had to make all kinds of design decisions when adding content. If they needed to add a heading they had to decide what that heading looked like. If they wanted to make a piece of content stand out, they would pick a colour and font size to make that happen.

However, when a site has been built with standards the content provider doesn’t need to worry about what content will look like. They simply say this is a heading by defining it as an H1 and the CSS will decide how to style this. Equally to make something stand out they mark it as strong and the style sheet does the rest. Simple.

The only problem is that some content management systems do not have WYSIWYG editors capable of supporting this approach. They are still focused on giving the content provider design control. Fortunately there are editors out there that do think in this way. A good example is xstandard although there are others. These can just be dropped into your CMS.

Finally, it is certainly possible to plug standards based code into a CMS. Infact, it is actually easier because the style and content have been separated. A content management system is (as it name suggests) primarily concerned with content. It doesn’t care about how that content is styled. Nothing makes integration easier than nice clean meaningful markup, unencumbered by formatting.

111. Utopia

Posted in Classic shows on February 14, 2008 by Paul Boag

On show 111: Designer and developer work together in utopian harmony. Two great listener reviews and Aral Balkan announces the biggest online web design conference ever.

Podcast: Download (31.2MB)

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.

Show 98: Flybe Farce

Posted in Classic shows on October 16, 2007 by Paul Boag

On this week’s show: Paul looks at the ongoing role of the website manager. Marcus looks at when to allow a loss leading project and instead of an expert section we are looking at the ultimate web design reading list.

Podcast: Download (18.7MB)

News and events | Loss leading projects | Ongoing role of the web designer | Web designers reading list | Question of the week

Housekeeping: Prizes and problems

A free ticket for FOWD (New York)

With the 100th boagworld show coming up on the 20th October I am beginning to feel guilty. After all its going to be such a great time and all you poor Americans are going to miss out. I know how hard done by you all are and I couldn’t live with myself if I didn’t offer something as compensation.

Fortunately the guys at Carsonified are insuring that at least one of you poor hard done by Americans have something to cheer you up! They are offering you the chance to win a free ticket to the Future of Web Design conference in New York City between the 6-8 November. The ticket normally cost $195 and you get to see great speakers such as Jeffrey Zeldman, Andy Clarke, and Ryan Singer.

Now obviously this is not as good as going to the recording of the 100th boagworld but you will have to just struggle through. For your chance to win a ticket simply email me your name by the 22nd October and we will pick a random winner. For more information on the conference itself visit futureofwebdesign.com.

Download problems

From time to time I get emails from you complaining that episodes of Boagworld are getting cut short in itunes. Its rare but does happen. Unfortunately this is one of itunes less publicized ‘features’. I just wanted to say that the files are complete, the problem is that the connection gets dropped part way through and itunes thinks it has finished. If this happens to you simply delete the file and re-download it from scratch. It almost always comes down fine second time.

News and events

Em Calculator

Personally, I love using ems. Although I don’t use them extensively on every site I build but I do use them a lot. They strike me as the perfect compromise between the pixel perfect control of fixed design and the accessibility and flexibility of fluid. Ems based sites scale as the user increases text size providing a rudimentary zoom functionality.

However I am not claiming that ems are perfect. They are not always the most appropriate solution and have their own technical difficulties. One personal problem I always had with ems was working out the sizing. The problem is that ems inherit from one another. 1 em may equal 10 pixels in one part of the HTML but equal something entirely different deeper down because of inheritance.

I always hated maths and so it is unsurprising that this inheritance issue made my brain want to dribble out of my ears. You can therefore imagine my relief to discover this week that somebody has built a great little em calculator that works out this nesting for you. Simply set the base size and then add the nested tags and em setting for each. The calculator does the rest.

Check it out. I guarantee if you work with ems regularly you will think it is a real time saver.

How to disarm 10 difficult client observations/requests

Next up, a great article about dealing with clients. We all know what it feels like, client after client churn out the same old comments…

I’ll know what I like when I see it.

or…

I love beige; can we get more beige in this?

… the list goes on. These kinds of questions are horribly frustrating and despite the fact that we hear them time and again we are often left floundering as to how to respond. This article lists 10 such comments from clients and proposes some ways to respond to them.

Obviously everybody has to respond to these questions in a way that suits them. However, it is still interesting to see how others suggest you answer these questions. Check it out and then post how you would respond to those questions in our comments.

The resurrection of downloadable fonts

Next up, the return of the downloadable font. Some call it the Holy Grail of web typography. Others just believe it would be used and abused. However, whatever you think you cannot deny that being able to define whatever font you like on a website is something that there is demand for.

The idea has been around since 1998 but different implementations of it by browser manufacturers meant it never gained traction. However according to a number of courses including Robert Nyman it looks like it is back on the cards again.

Both Safari and Opera have now implemented a standards based solution to the problem called @font-face, which is certainly good news. However, until IE and Firefox follow suit this is still not going to get a lot of traction. We will have to wait and see.

Creating better user personas

I feel like I have been talking about user personas a lot recently. They are certainly a tool I have been using for a long time and with good reason. I find them incredibly useful in focusing the designer and client on who they are developing for. They help to define functionality, content, tone and design.

However although I have done an introduction to personas on the show I have avoided going into too much depth. Developing a really good persona is a skill and I am far from an expert. However, if you do want to learn more about personas then you should consider reading Ten Steps to Personas a relatively short article outlining some more advanced techniques.

Now I should warn you up front this is not the easiest of reads. It is certainly more heavy duty than most of the things we cover here. However, I wanted to mention it because I know many of you are already using personas and this will take you to the next level. Also if all else fails it has a very useful chart outlining the steps accompanied by lots of pretty pictures ;)

Marcus’ bit: When to allow a loss leading project

Even after going on at length in this podcast about making sure that contracts are in place, tasks are recorded in detail, requirements consultations are paid for and project management effort is not underestimated – all to avoid under-charging – sometimes there are occasions when you should take a hit and do a project as a loss leader. In this week’s show Marcus explains why loss leaders are sometimes a good idea.

Paul’s corner: Ongoing role of the website manager

While writing my book I have been thinking a lot about the role of the website manager. In particular it has struck me how underestimated the role is. One aspect of the job that is particularly overlooked is the long term commitment involved. In the book I talk about what that ongoing role is and what companies need to consider if they are going to properly support a website over it life. Fortunately my publisher is keen for me to share my thoughts on various aspects of the book so I have put together a blog on the ongoing role of the website manager.

Web Designers reading list

Instead of doing an ask the expert section this week I thought I would answer the single most common question I get from people who listen to this show…

What books would you recommend.

This is something I have blogged and spoken on before but I am going to give you my latest list of top picks based on my ever growing reading list.

Question of the week

What books would you recommend about web design? 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 88: Two fat ladies

Posted in Classic shows on July 31, 2007 by Paul Boag

On this week’s show: Paul shares some thoughts on recording your creative ideas, Marcus discusses setting up a web design company and we review the Principles of Beautiful web design by Jason Beaird.

Podcast: Download (19.7MB)

Housekeeping

Before we get into the news there are a couple of housekeeping items I want to share with you all…

Eric Meyer Competition

In last week’s show we ran a competition to win a free ticket to Eric Meyer’s upcoming London workshop. The response to the competition has been truly phenomenal with a surprising mix of answer to our question…

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

The answer was actually the very first show although we did have many suggest it was show 2. Although Show 2 was dedicated to web standards they were actually mentioned in the very first episode. Very well done to all of those of you who spotted that little trick in the question.

Anyway the winner, selected at random from the correct answers is… John Thixton.

Congratulations John, we will be in contact shortly to get you signed up.

Thanks very much to the guys over at Carson Systems who were kind enough to supply us with the free ticket. Don’t forget that even if you didn’t win you can still sign up for the workshop on the Carson systems website.

100th Boagworld

Next up, you may remember that a few weeks back we talked about the fact that we wanted to have a little celebration to mark the 100th episode of the boagworld podcast. Well, thanks to the organizational skills of Ian Forrester we now have a date and a venue. We will be recording the 100th episode of boagworld live at Ye Old Cock Tavern, London on Saturday 20th October 2007.

As well as recording the show live we are going to put a big wad of cash behind the bar so there should be free drinks for a while. We really appreciate all of the support you guys have given us over the last couple of years and want to in some way say thank you.

If you can possibly turn up it would be great to see you. Book it in to your calendar and sign up on upcoming. Please take the time to sign up on upcoming because it gives us an idea of how many people are coming.

News and events

Web redesign is a bad strategy

My first news story of the week is yet another post by Gerry McGovern. This article definitely makes up for his previous post about the best sites being ugly sites! This time around he talks about a particular passion of mine. He argues that website redesigns are nearly always a bad idea and that it fails to address the underlying issues.

This is certainly a position I have held for a long time. I believe that sites should evolve instead of going through a succession of wholesale redesigns. McGovern argues that redesigns too often happen for the wrong reasons such as changes in management, boredom, or a feeling the site has fallen into disrepair. I couldn’t agree more and would encourage people to think twice before complete overhauling their website.

YSlow for Firebug

Those lovely folks over at the Yahoo! Developer Network have been kind enough to produce a great plugin to the firebug firefox extension. I have spoken on the show before about how firebug provides loads of useful functionality to web developers including the ability to edit, debug and monitor both CSS and Javascript on live sites. However YSlow adds to that already impressive line up of functionality.

YSlow analyzes web pages and tells you why they’re slow based on the rules for high performance web sites. It analyzes any web page and generates a grade for each rule and an overall grade. If a page can be improved, YSlow lists the specific changes to be made. It also calculates the total size of the web page for both empty cache and primed cache scenarios, as well as information about cookies. Finally, it lists all the components in the page allows you to view the HTTP response headers for any component.

Find redundant CSS selectors

Talking of useful development tools for firefox, you might want to check out the Dust-me selector which has been released by the sitepoint guys this week. The dust-me extension helps you find unused CSS selectors.

You know what it is like. Maybe you are working with somebody else’s CSS file or maybe you are working on an old website and can’t remember what you have done. Whatever the case you don’t know what half of the CSS selectors do and so dare not remove any just in case they are used somewhere. Enter Dust-me.

Dust-me will monitor the pages of a website you surf around making a list of any unused styles it finds in attached stylesheets. The list is constantly updated as you move from page to page. Once you have looked around the whole site you end up with a definitive list of styles which can be safely removed. Nice!

Although this is useful I am sure there must be something out there which scans all of the HTML pages and saves you the effort of navigating around the site. If you know of such a tool post it on the show notes.

Marcus’ bit: Setting up a web design company

We got this question from Ali:

Have you done any podcasts on how to start a business? More specifically a web design company such as the one you have. Just a request if you have not done a podcast, could you have a whole one dedicated to starting a web design business. I mean how to start one, start with business plan or just start one day building websites for various people and build your own portfolio?

We have previously discussed the aspects of running a web design company, recently covering who you should look to employ and a little bit further back a fairly long piece where Paul and I reminisced about setting up Headscape. However, we haven’t really looked at the initial set up properly.

Though we’re not going to dedicate the whole podcast to it, I thought I would cover some of the things you need to think about.

Business plan?

To be totally honest, unless you are looking for funding, then I think writing a business plan is a waste of effort. I do think it is a good idea to write down what you want from the business and how you think you want the business to be viewed – in essence, a mission statement (though it has to actually mean something!).

It is also worth asking yourself where you want the business to be in 2, 3, 5 and 10 years time. Keep reviewing and don’t be afraid to change as your views and your business changes.

Coming back to funding; unless you are looking to develop a product and therefore require R&D time (and therefore backing) you shouldn’t really need any funding. If you can run your business from home the set up costs are fairly minimal.

Forecasting

Running a web design company, from a business point of view, can be a fairly nervy existence. Put simply, there is only so much work you can take on at any one time and clients will rarely wait for you to be ready, so there is always a point in the not too distant future (1, 2 maybe 3 months) where the work ends.

Therefore, not only do you need to be out there pitching for work, you also need have a good idea of what you need to make each month to break even. This takes thought and usually the input of someone with some accountancy experience. Producing an annual financial forecast has been invaluable to us as we know exactly where we stand throughout the year.

Keep a close eye on productivity as this is the bane of the fixed price service business. It’s very easy to get excited about a big new contract but they are usually the ones that end up being priced badly, take much longer to complete than originally expected and therefore ending costing you; not only on the visible bottom line but also in lost sales because you couldn’t take on new work.

Keep searching for new clients

When a business starts it tends to rely on a handful of clients to survive. This is perfectly normal but it means that young businesses are placed at risk if they lose one good client. I have always said that sales get easier and easier as time moves on based simply on numbers. In other words: the more clients you sign up, the more referrals you will get.
So, in the early days, make a particular effort to gain new clients as well as relying on existing ones.

Ok, that covers some general good practice, but what about some of the more detailed stuff.

Decide on branding

Here’s a few fundamentals:

Company name
URL – Obviously relates hugely to the previous point!
Logo/ corporate ID – you will need letterheads, business cards, invoices etc
Build your website – much as this is the biggest pain possible, it is fundamental. In the beginning it’s that old rock and hard place scenario where you can’t win new web design work because you only have a holding page, but you can’t build the site because you are working on precious paid work. I wondered recently why I tend not to work so many evenings as I used to – now I remember!

Boring stuff

You will need to register your company. In the UK this costs money, not a great deal but you will need to do it.
Limited company, partnership, sole trader? Take advice from professionals on this and other items here.
Insurance – I covered this in a recent podcast so I won’t go into detail, but you do need to look at:
- Professional indemnity
- Public/product liability
- Employers liability
- Key man
Contracts – you need to sort out your standard contract documentation before you start and make sure that it is used for all jobs.

Pitching early on

Even though it can feel like you don’t stand a chance against more well-established agencies, you do hold a few aces:

You have fresh ideas
You’re keen
Even though your company doesn’t have a much of a portfolio, there is no reason at all why you can’t demonstrate work done at previous companies as long as you’re honest about it and explain, in detail, about your role
You’re cheap! However, don’t continually undercut your own margins or you won’t be in business for long. Be prepared to walk away… be prepared to walk away!

Initial prospects

This is when friends, family and old work colleagues come to the fore. Even though I have just pointed out some of the good points relating to early businesses, gaining some business ‘easily’ through your contacts is highly recommended.

The cost of sale is usually much less so, again, you are helping out that bottom line and giving yourself more time for production work and pitching.

Consider outsourcing

Finally, try to build up a group of trustworthy contacts that you can outsource to a) when it gets really busy and b) if there’s a part of a project that is outside your skillset.

Paul’s corner: Recording creativity

I like to think of myself as an ideas person. I guess that is another way of saying that I am crap at implementing the ideas I have. One problem I used to suffer from was recording the ideas I had in a form that I could refer back to later. Overtime I have developed a couple of techniques that help me manage my ideas better. Whether you are a designer, developer or website owner, we are all required to be creative in our jobs. We are all looking for ways to become more creative. With that in mind I thought I would share some of those techniques with you.

Review: The Principles of Beautiful Web Design

This week I have received probably the most sarcastic and rude question ever to be sent to me. However, at the heart of all that cheek there was actually a very good question…

Once you have got to grips with the basic of HTML and CSS where do you go next?

Its a good question and there are a lot of potential answers to it. However one of the more sarcastic comments that surrounded the question made me think that perhaps the next step is to ensure a good grasp of basic design principles such as layout, typography, imagery and colour.

This in turn made me think of the book I am reading at the moment, “The Principles of Beautiful Web Design” by Jason Beaird.

Jason’s book really is a basic introduction to good design practices for the web. It is ideal for developers, amateurs or indeed anybody looking to improve the look and feel of their website. It is made up of 5 chapters each dedicated to one aspect of good design; layout, colour, texture, typography and imagery. It really is very good and talks a lot of real sense. I could imagine this being very useful for web site owners who want to understand the design process better and be more informed when signing off designs submitted to them by an agency.

However, what surprised me the most was how useful i found it myself (as somebody who calls himself a designer). I was intending to have a quick flick through the book so I could get the gist of what was being covered. However, I found myself being drawn in by Jason’s friendly writing style and by finding myself continually going “oh I forgotten about that” or “I really should spend more time doing that”. In short it works as a useful reminder service to designers too.

Check it out. Its a worthwhile read if you want to go over the basics.

Show 83: iphone bollocks

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

On this week’s show: Paul talks about the importance of undo, Marcus explains the benefits of stakeholder interviews and Struan Robertson highlights some legal deathtraps waiting for us online.

Podcast: Download (19.3MB)

News and events

Safari for Windows

Probably the most talked about story of the last week is the fact that Apple have released Safari for windows. To be honest I am a little surprised just how much has been written about this considering I don’t think the impact is going to be that significant. Will Safari cut into Internet Explorers market share? Probably not. Will it undermine the market share Firefox has developed? Almost certainly.

If safari under windows rendered exactly the same as under OSX then there maybe some benefit to windows based web developers. At the moment it is impossible for them to test on Safari without buying a mac. This has the potential of changing that. However, in all likelihood differences will emerge and if they do then this is just another browser that we have to test against.

We will see.

Applications for the iphone

At the same time Steve Jobs announced Safari for windows he also talked about the iphone. The biggest criticism of the iphone to date has been the fact that it is locked down so third parties cannot develop applications for it. Apparently Apple have been thinking long and hard about the problem and have come up with a solution. They are going to allow developers to build web 2.0 applications that can be accessed by iphone users using the built in Safari browser.

What a load of bollocks. They are telling us something we already knew. As soon as Steve Jobs announced that the iphone carried a full safari browser we knew that web applications would be developed for it. Sure, they are now saying that methods are going to be provided to automatically access iphone features such as dialing and google maps but very little detail was given. As far as I can see Apple is not giving people anything more than they already had.

Jason at 37 Signals is excited about what this means for web apps. He says…

This is the coming out party for web apps. We are very excited about this. These are exciting times.

…and he is right. It is exciting for us web developers. However, I am not convinced the user will see it that way. David Shea mirrored my own reaction at this news when he simply posted a graph showing the astronomical cost of data calls on mobile carriers. Web applications are great for web designers but for users of mobile devices like the iphone they could quickly be prohibitively expensive.

Web Design-isms: 7 Surefire Styles that Work

I found a great article on Think Vitamin this week that talks about design trends on the web. One of the things you learn early on as a designer is that despite your desire to produce something completely original you never will. Everything has been done before and in this article Larissa Meek takes us through 7 styles of design that appear again and again on the web.

The article very much reminded me of design meltdown, an excellent site that showcases different approaches to design. However, what I particularly liked about this post is that the author showed examples of how these styles occur in art as well as online. This is nice because it encourages us as web designers to look beyond the web for inspiration, a subject I have spoken about before.

CSS frameworks

The final story caught my eye because it is an extension of something we have been doing for a while. A while back I talked on the show about the fact that Headscape work with standard XHTML templates. We use these templates as a starting point for development. They allow you to jump start the build process as well as ensure consist naming conventions across the entire design team.

In a new post on the List Apart website Jeff Croft proposes a similar approach for CSS, based on the concept of Frameworks. Jeff argues that certain aspects of CSS development are often repeated across multiple projects. From browser reset styles to creating horizontal menus and standard grid layouts, it seems absurd that we generate these from scratch each time. Jeff proposes that instead we create a series of CSS files that we can be reuse again.

Its a great idea and one definitely worth exploring if you work on lots of similar projects or are part of a large team where you are looking for consistency.

Agony uncle: The importance of undo

A couple of weeks back I received this email from Tom in Texas:

I am a designer currently working on developing a web 2.0 app. The developer is doing some really cool AJAX stuff but unfortunately most of it breaks the back button in the browser. He is arguing that it doesn’t really matter as there are lots of other ways of going back. What is your opinion on the subject?

Once I had recovered from the naivety of the developers comment and finished counting slowly to 10, I started to think through the role of undo. In the end this very simple question from Tom evolved into a blog post on the importance of undo. It is this subject I am looking at in todays show.

Client corner: Stakeholder interviews

Got this question from Dusted.

I’m about to begin a project to help an organization evaluate its current web site and web site management. I’m also going to perform some research and planning to help them start developing a new web site.

The organization is quite complex with a lot of different departments – marketing/events, sales, information/press, youth and more. Each person responsible for each department will be interviewed and I need some advice about what questions to ask them.

Starting off with a few…

Describe your department’s needs of the web site.

What can be done in a better way?

The results of the interviews will be used when I present my evaluation (and research/planning) to the board.

Any advice, links to articles, books… help of any kind would be deeply appreciated.

We have done quite a lot of stakeholder interviews over the years so this question seemed like one I could help with.

Stakeholder interviews can often be confused with user interviews, as they can often happen during the same process. I tend to differentiate the 2 by calling them internal and external stakeholders. These groups will always require a very different set of questions.

This piece refers to internal stakeholders only; those people that:

Will be paying for the project!
Are content owners
- Some won’t know or want to be content owners – “that’s X’s job”
- Some will consider their content considerably more important than everyone elses – “there should be a tab called ‘Corporate Accountancy’ and a big ad on the homepage”!
Will be users e.g. sales

There are a number of good reasons for talking to stakeholders, as follows:

Politics

Most organisations involve some sort of tension between departments/stakeholders/teams/whatever. Giving representatives from each of these groups (make sure you don’t leave anyone out!) provides everyone with a voice. It ensures that everyone has said their piece and it’s down in writing. Ultimately, it gets buy in on the project from all parties thereby creating a better end product.

Education

This applies from both sides. The interviewer is looking to be educated regarding the various points and specialisms that the interviewee has (that’s the point of the interview!). However, the interviewer also has an opportunity to educate a whole raft of internal staff about the web. A good example would be why it’s not a good idea to name site sections after departmental structure. In fact, teaching users to think of their end users early in the interview will probably affect what they have to say.

Verification

Talking to internal stakeholders can often highlight the need to develop certain functionality/facilities/micro-sites/etc that web managers only thought might be useful. Interviews can also be used as a test bed for ideas as well as feedback.

Semi-structured

Following on form the last point, make a point of telling interviewees that they can go off track. The questions are useful as guides but don’t stop writing down what someone is saying if it doesn’t fit with the script.

So, finally on to some good questions to ask&#…;

Questions will, of course, vary depending on the organisation, end user requirements etc, but looking back through a number of scripts, these seem to crop up regularly:

What does your department do?
What are your ‘processes’?
Who is your client and what do they want?
How do you think the web can help you deliver?
What is your role?
What is the biggest pain about your job? What takes the most time?
Describe your Internet understanding/usage?
Describe your software understanding/usage?
Name applications that you are a confident user of.
Do you store any information in databases? What?
The current website – what’s good and bad about it, what’s bad about it?
Are you tasked with providing content for part of the website? If not, do you want to be?

Ask the expert: Struan Robertson on Legal Issues

Today’s guest expert on Boagworld is Struan Robertson a corporate lawyer who specializes in IT law. I first met him on the .net podcast and thought it would be great to get him on the show to give us a small taster of the kinds of legal issues encountered by web professionals. In the show he answers three questions on particular scenarios to give you a taster of the kind of issues that can arise. These include:

What are the dangers of working on websites for illegal companies
Some of the issues surrounding using images when you aren’t sure about the licensing
Storing private data

Although the particular scenarios are quite specific hopefully they communicate some underlying messages and encourage you to take your legal obligations seriously. If you are interested in learning more about the legal issues surrounding web design and IT in general then check out Outlaw.com where Struan provides a lot more advice. Also Struan writes a column in the .net magazine where he covers different legal issues each month.

Show 75: Christian Bears

Posted in Classic shows on April 16, 2007 by Paul Boag

Marcus is back and talks about what to do if a client doesn’t pay. I look at clearing floats in CSS and we have Richard Rutter on the show giving us the lowdown on good web typography.

Podcast: Download (22.9MB)

News and Events

Blogger’s code of conduct

This week has seen Tim O’Reilly pushing hard for a code of conduct among bloggers following the vicious online attacks against Kathy Sierra. Although, like everybody else, I was shocked by what Kathy has been through and although I respect Tim’s endeavors to change the current situation, I struggle to see what good a code of conduct will really do.

Tips for Bloggers

Tom Johnson has drawn together 20 principles for a successful blog based on feedback he has received from numerous top bloggers. If you are new to blogging or trying to revive a failing blog this article is definitely worth checking out.

120 Adobe Photoshop tips

Talking of tech tips, check out this superb document of over 100 things you never knew you could do in Photoshop. As a regular Photoshop user I was shocked by just how many of these I was unaware of. For example did you know that you could:

Straighten a crooked image using the measure tool?
Access key image function by right clicking the top bar of an image?
Modify the text on multiple text layers at the same time?

CSS Vista

The wonderful folks over at Site Vista has released a superb new tool that allows you to edit CSS files and instantly see the changes in both Firefox and Internet Explorer simultaneously. Very useful indeed although currently it is only available under windows.

Client corner: Resolving payment disputes

This week Marcus answers a question from Dan in Texas. Dan has a client who hasn’t paid and so is asking whether he should take their site down or not.

The core of Marcus’ approach is to ensure good dialogue with the client. He covers the idea that prevention is better than cure by establishing clear contracts up front but then looks at what steps can be taken if things do go wrong. We also when this happened to us at Headscape and how we resolved the dispute.

Marcus also broadens the discussion to look at it from the client’s perspective. He investigates when a client should withhold payment and how this should be discussed with the web agency.

Ask the expert: Richard Rutter on web typography

Richard Rutter is one of the three founders of Clear:Left and is passionate about typography. In fact he is so passionate that he has produced a practical guide to web typography which is freely available at webtypography.net. He therefore seemed the logical choice to introduce us to the basics of using typography on the web.

Agony Uncle: Clearing Floats

I got sent a question by Dan in Texas ages ago and I promised him we would tackle it on the show. Unfortunately I totally forgot about it until I read this recent article by Robert Nyman a couple of days back. Dan was asking about dealing with floats in CSS and how to ensure that the parent of a floated item contained it. This was exactly what Robert was talking about in his post and so I have shamelessly used his thoughts in the show to answer Dan’s question. Thanks Robert ;)

Review: Question Form

I am a great believer in giving users the chance to feedback their thoughts on a site. However its not always that easy. Online forms and email are hard to collate and all of the survey services I have found online in the past are crap. However, recently I came across a site called Question Form which really does stand head and shoulders above the competition

It is incredibly quick and easy to put a survey together
It provides a painless user experience to the user
You have complete customizable control over how your form looks
It provides excellent statistics as well as access to individual responses
It offers alerts of new responses via email, RSS and even SMS

The basic account is absolutely free and the pro accounts start from as little as $10. If you are thinking of adding a survey to your site then you should definitely check these guys out.

If you fancy trying a form out then take a second to complete the boagworld podcast survey.

Show 75 Script

In last week’s show I posted the rather muddled notes I use when recording the show. This was to make up for the less than perfect show notes I provide here. This idea seemed popular so here is my script from this week’s show.

Show 72: Neverending Beta

Posted in Classic shows on March 27, 2007 by Paul Boag

On this week’s show: web stats meet usability testing, Apollo and why it is important, working with corporate colour palettes and how to sell your web design services.

Podcast: Download (24.1MB)

News and events

This week appears to be the week of never-ending betas however I have managed to squeeze in some pointless fun and an article about accessible content management systems:

Click2Map

There seems to be a growing number of tools out there that make the management of Google Maps easier. One that I have just discovered this week is Click2Map. You can easily and quickly add custom markers by entering an address (even if you are outside of the US). It is still in beta and needs a lot of work (for example you cannot integrate the maps directly into your site) but it is still great for a quick and easy way of linking to locations.

Popuri.us

Another “beta” service I spotted this week is Popuri.us. This site provides SEO reports on your site including rankings on Google, Yahoo, Alexa, Delicious and Technorati. Currently it seems to be suffering from some performance issues; nevertheless it gives a good indication of your online visibility. Of course if you are a Firefox user you may find the SEO add-on more convenient.

Finding an accessible CMS

One of the biggest complaints against content management systems is that they are often not very accessible. Gez Lemon has been kind enough to do an analysis of a whole bunch of them for us and provides a great article on the pros and cons of each from an accessibility point of view. If you are considering implementing a CMS and care about accessibility (which you should do) then check this out.

Arial vs Helvetica

So you think you know your typefaces? Maybe you are even a bit of a typography snob? But, can you tell the difference between Arial and Helvetica? Of course you can, at least that was what I thought until I actually tried.

Selling your web design services

So this week’s client corner is seriously lacking advice for clients (sorry about that). Instead Marcus takes a look at the subject of selling your web design services. Surprisingly for Marcus, he has written fairly comprehensive notes on what we covered so here you go…
You may build the best websites in the world but if you do not know how to sell your services then nobody will hire you. Web design, like nearly everything, is a competitive marketplace and simply being a good designer/developer is not enough. You also need a sales and marketing hat.
That said, it does seem that there is more work out there than agencies to do it.

Cold call?

Don’t buy databases of ‘quality’ contacts in a particular sector. I may be cynical but I reckon the vast majority of these ‘leads’ were tricked into supplying their details. You’re trying to sell solutions to your potential clients’ online problems not pallets of dog food. I my experience, cold calling is a waste of time and effort – the only way you’ll win work is if you’re lucky enough to call someone when they’re about to release a tender.
The only exception to this rule are local businesses where picking up the phone and saying ‘hi, we’re just over the road from you and we’re really good at what we do. If you ever need the services that we provide please do include us in any suppler selection process you intend to go through’. If they’re friendly why not meet up for a beer (see Love Your Clients)…

Focus on a specific market sector

If your only case study is a sewage works site then go after other sewage works sites first. This is common sense: you have a proven ability to produce a website with probably very similar features to the one the other sewage site wants. You have a real, live working example to show them and a client who will (hopefully) say nice things about you.

Tender sites

I get asked about these a lot. They are (I think) better than straight cold calling but not much. Golden rule – don’t do any speculative design work as some may be a scam. I think most of these are simply there because a lot of tenders are required to be competitive but the client already has a preferred agency. I have generated a ‘nose’ for when we are making up numbers so, if you get that feeling, be brave, walk away…
Of course, try to talk (and I mean talk not email) to the client. Be bold, ask questions about how many others are going for the project, what is the budget (we need to know to be able to provide the most appropriate solution), are the deadlines set in stone etc etc etc… If you’re getting negative feelings… guess what… walk away…
If you do decide to go for something off one of these sites, I recommend the following as a response:

boiler plate ‘Why Us’. You should already have this in another proposal. Up to 10 pages of skills, experience, examples of design work and above all USP.
No more than 2 sides of A4 of ‘your solution’ i.e. a summary.
Tasks by task breakdown of price (inc. payment terms with at least a third up front (‘on delivery’ if you’re really worried about the client!)

The trick here is to start at the bottom. Do the task breakdown first (it may put you way over budget if you know it – if so, walk away) which will lead to an obvious solution summary then tack the ‘aren’t we great’ on the front.
The idea is to put as little effort in as possible without making it look that way.
Much better idea to…

Market, market, market!

There are so many ways to market yourself. For example, you can drive round your local neighbourhood shouting through a loud hailer if you like! Headscape’s marketing effort is focussed virtually solely on Boagworld now. The point is, try to find something that you can do that you feel passionate about and will get people either ringing you directly or, just as good, recommending you to others.

Know when to walk away

It is the hardest thing in the world to do, but it is important that you know when to turn down work. There are times when the clients requirements are unrealistic or the job is simply too big. On other occasions, the chance of winning a job does not justify the investment involved in pitching for it. There is a natural tendency to want to run after every piece of work, but sometimes you just have to say no.
I got the impression listening at SXSW that the agencies I most admire (e.g. Happy Cog) simply wait around for projects that they are interested in and the clients should be damn grateful! Or maybe that was the impression that Mr Z wanted to convey.

Ask an expert: Aral on Apollo

Aral Balkan is one of my favourite speakers and this week in the “ask an expert” section he puts his enthusiasm and humour into an insightful introduction of Apollo. Apollo is a new development platform from Adobe that allows web designers to start developing desktop applications.

Working with corporate colours

This week’s agony uncle question is based on something I found in the boagworld forum. Pecko asked whether we should use Photoshop to convert corporate colours for the web or whether we should do it by hand. A lot of the people on the forum argued that you should allow Photoshop to take the strain but in the show I argue that we should do it by hand. My argument was based on something I had read before and yet I couldn’t for the life of me remember where I had read it. I eventually found it was from a brilliant article by Jason Santa Maria on 24 Ways. I hope he will forgive me for not crediting him on the show.

Review: ClickTale

I was recently asked to beta test ClickTale, a new statistics-tracking tool. Not only does it provide you with all of the basic web stats you would expect, it also allows you to watch recordings of how users interact with your site. You can see their cursor move around the screen, watch them scroll and even move between pages. The product is currently in closed beta but it is definitely worth keeping an eye on because it is extremely powerful and acts as a passable alternative when usability testing is just not an option.

Show 64: Hosting

Posted in Classic shows on January 22, 2007 by Paul Boag

This week on Boagworld we explain all you need to know about hosting , look at how to interpret other people’s CSS and review an excellent HTML email testing tool. Oh yes… and Marcus drones on about client stuff.

Podcast: Download (22.3MB)

News and events

Heuristic Testing

This week seems to be the week of Heuristic usability testing. Andy Budd kicked us off with a post on how Jakob Nielsen’s classic article on heuristic testing needs updating to take into account the new generation of web applications. Lisa Herrod then followed up with an excellent article on the sitepoint website looking at how heuristic testing can be used by web development teams.

The Future of Web Design

I know that a lot of people cannot afford the time or money to go to web conferences but I thought the Future of Web Design one day conference was worth a mention as it is only £59. It has a great line up of speakers including people from 37Signals, Flickr and Adaptive Path.

Tips for better design review process

You maybe the best designer in the world but if you cannot “sell” your designs to the client then more often than not they will be rejected. Many designers hate the design sign off process and are often frustrated with the final result. Keith Robinson has written a superb article that will help you better manage the successful sign off of your designs.

Seven Accessibility Mistakes

A while back Chris Heilmann wrote two articles on typical accessibility mistakes that people should avoid at all costs. I am sure that they were great articles but I never got around to reading them. Fortunately Roger Johansson has taken the time to summarise them in a nice easy to digest format.

Client corner: Questions for designers

How do you know which is the right web design agency to go with? Proposals are important but what questions do you ask at the presentation? This week Marcus gives website owners the inside track on what to ask prospective web design agencies. Here are some of the main points he covered:

Get a detailed breakdown of rates and pricing.
Understand what happens if things go wrong.
Ask about the contractual arrangements.
Request financial information on the company.
Get detailed information on the work they have done.
Know the team who will be working on your project.
Always ask to speak to existing clients.

Agony Uncle: Understanding other people’s CSS

There is nothing worse than working on a site built by somebody else. This especially true when it comes to the CSS. What styles affect which elements? How do the styles cascade down? What is going to be effected if I make a change to a style? This week in the agony uncle corner we look at some of the tools which can help solve these issues. In particular we take a look at the Firebug Firefox extension and the CSS panel in Dreamweaver.

Ask an expert: Mark Crawley on hosting

One of the things that has been requested for the “ask an expert” section is that we try and get on some new names rather than the normal “web celebs”. With that in mind this week’s guy is an old work colleague of mine; Mark Crawley. He talks about an area we should have covered a long time ago… hosting.

Review: Testing HTML Email

Although many condemn HTML emails as truly evil, the reality is that many of us are occasionally forced by clients into producing them. Setting aside the appalling support for standards, the next biggest headache with working on HTML emails is testing. Fortunately Site Vista, a UK based company has solved the problem by producing a testing suite very similar to Browser cam but for email.

Podcast 61: Christmas Special

Posted in Classic shows on December 11, 2006 by Paul Boag

In our Christmas Podcast Special; Skype murders Marcus rendition of Silent Night, Paul shares his list to Santa and they both look at the successes and failures of the web over the last year.

Podcast: Download (24.1MB)

I know what you’re thinking; “not the most riveting subject”. However, don’t let that put you off. Although return on investment might not float your boat, it is still extremely important and you should take the time to listen to this show.

So another year is done and boagworld finishes for its Christmas break. We will be back in January but until then you can enjoy this extra special episode of the show.

It’s been a real pleasure working on the show over the last year. We really want to thank you all for listening. We never anticipated that the show would prove such a success and hopefully we can continue to keep it fresh and exciting in the New Year with our new format.

This year’s Christmas special is slightly more structured than last year’s so I figured a few notes on what we covered maybe appropriate. Enjoy!

Special offers to boagworld listeners

A couple of companies that listen to boagworld wanted to give something back to the boagworld community. Although I haven’t purchased from either site yet myself, I thought it was nice they were enthusiastic to share a small token with you all.

Houlton Wines will give you a 10% discount if you quote the coupon code “boagworld” when ordering. Equally Seams will offer 25% off any tshirt if you quote to code “boagworld001” when you checkout with paypal.

News

I tried to give the news a Christmas theme this week by ensuring all the stories had a Christmas slant. Guess which one fails to meet the criteria!

Biggest Tech Mistakes of 2006

Thank you to everybody who nominated a tech mistake of 2006. Below is the shortlist. You will have to listen to the show to hear who Marcus announced as the winner.

Best web applications of 2006

Also in the show we look at the best web sites and applications of the year. Nominations include:

Dear Santa

I thought it might be fun to share some of the gadgets I will be asking Christmas for this year. Of course if you want to buy me any of them I am sure Santa won’t mind!

Finally, we do a quick review of the services offered the Shaw Trust. If you haven’t come across these guys before then definitely check them out. They offer some very interesting web accessibility services which is ideal if you want to test your site with real disabled users.

Thanks for listening, and we will speak to you all in the New Year. Happy Christmas!

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 45: The importance of art direction

Posted in Classic shows on July 31, 2006 by Paul Boag

This week on boagworld, we get all pretentious and arty as we talk about the need for “art direction”. We share a few tips on how to ensure your site can expand easily over time and we look at what is in the news.

Podcast: Download (19.7MB)

Art Direction

Every other creative sector has it and yet the web seems to thinks it can do without. Art Direction is the cornerstone of the advertising industry and yet is sadly lacking among web designers to the detriment of our sites. In this week’s show, we discuss Art direction; what is it, how does it relate to the web and how to go about using it?

The discussion is largely based on an article I posted a while back about Art Direction. I suggest you check that out for more details on what we cover.

Art direction on the web

In the news

As normal there has been loads happening in the world of web designer over the last week:

IE 7

There has been yet more discussion surrounding IE 7. Think Vitamin have released an audio interview with Chris Wilson (lead developer for IE 7) confirming that IE 7 will be released as an automatic update but unfortunately will not be marked critical.

Also on the IE front, the Web Standards Project seems to be saying a somewhat premature goodbye to IE 6 while Firefox have pulled off a bit of a PR coup by registering ie7.com.

Designing through the storm

A list Apart released its latest edition this week with an excellent article aimed squarely at the designer community. Designing through the storm really gets to the nitty gritty of producing designs in the face of artistic block and difficult clients. Superb advice!

A call for greater professionalism

Egged on by John Allsopp, Molly is back on the subject of Web professionalism. Although I agree that the web design industry needs to "grow up" and start acting more professional, I am slightly unsure of whether Molly’s call for a charter is really going to help matters.

Google offers accessible search

This week Google has released a new version of its search engine weighted towards websites that offer improved accessibility. Aimed at the visually impaired community it aims to return results that give greater emphasis to sites that are friendlier to this audience. However the new engine is not without its problems.

Also in the show

This week we also look at how to build your website in a way that enables it to evolve gradually over time as well as review an excellent article on search engine optimisation drawn from a new book entitled "Deliver First Class Web Sites: 101 Essential Checklists".

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 38: Navigational Approaches

Posted in Classic shows on June 12, 2006 by Paul Boag

Paul and Marcus take a detailed look at the different types of navigation that can be used on a website.

Podcast: Download (25.5MB)

In this 38th episode of boagworld.com Paul and Marcus take a detailed look at the different types of navigation that can be used on a website. From the humble body link to the most complex site map, this episode tackles how to get the most from your sites navigation.