Tag Archives: javascript

Video: Introduction to WCAG 2

Posted in Accessibility on by Paul Boag

I recently gave an internal presentation at Headscape about WCAG 2. A number of people expressed an interest in seeing it so I made a point to record it.

At the end the presentation I references a stripped down version of the guidelines found here.

I also refer to a quick reference guide to WCAG 2 that can be found here.

Apologises

Apologises for the poor audio quality of this video. Unfortunately the decision to record the presentation was made at the last minute and so we didn’t have a proper mic setup arranged. You can also tell it is not quite as slick as my normal presentations :)

I would also like to apologise for the lack of transcript of this video. Again, it was not my initial intention to put this video online as this was an internal presentation containing my initial thoughts on WCAG 2. I am still learning a lot about the new guidelines and will publish a more considered article when I have a better understanding of the subject.

Feedback

On that subject, I would be interested to hear your feedback on the thoughts I present. Do you agree with my interpretation of the new guidelines? Have I misunderstood anything? Are there other elements I should have addressed? Your thoughts would be appreciated in the comments.

Update: We now have a transcript!

Thanks go to Anna Debenham who braved the horrendous audio to transcribe the presentation. If you cannot face the video we do at least now have a written version!

Paul: Ok, this has worked out a little bit weird because the idea initially with this presentation was that it was really about bringing us up to speed with WCAG2 now that WCAG2 has been released. But I made the mistake of mentioning it online and several people said “ooh, can you record that?” so now it’s a little bit of both, a little bit of a presentation to you guys and a little bit of a presentation that will go on the web.

Paul: So as you guys probably know, WCAG2 has now been released, and as accessibility is a big part of what we deliver and we talk a lot about accessibility, we need to be up to speed on it and we need to know what we’re doing. Obviously accessibility has become such a part of what we do day in and day out that we don’t necessarily think too much about it, it’s almost an intrinsic part of what we do, but with changes to WCAG2, or with the arrival of WCAG2, there have been differences, changes, things that have altered, so I want to make sure that everybody is up to speed with it. Feel free to butt in with questions, that’s absolutely fine.

Audience: Will the video be able to see the screen?

Paul: The video will be able to see the screen. Ok, so, WCAG2. Basically, WCAG1 came out in 1999 which is a good old time ago, in Internet terms that’s like forever, and there was a real need to make some changes and improve WCAG1. Let me just pop back and just explain.

The Journey to WCAG2

Paul: So, yeah, like I said, WCAG1 came out in 1999, it quickly dated as technology evolved, and some of the guidelines actually became harmful in a way. So you guys know that for example, we don’t always take note of what they say about Access Keys, we don’t always take note of what they say about “make sure you put text in an empty form field” and things like that. And WCAG1 was very much built with HTML in mind, and obviously the web is a lot broader than that and there are a lot more formats about. But unfortunately development of WCAG2 was very slow, and also fraught with controversy. I mean, famously with Joe Clarke who is an accessibility expert wrote on A List Apart “to hell with WCAG2″ because it basically had become a bit of a joke, because it was very generic; they were trying to write a set of guidelines that really made no effort to mention specific technology because they didn’t want it to date like WCAG1, but the result is it became unreadable and nobody could understand it.

WCAG2 Reborn

Paul: But, things did change. Major changes were made to the WCAG2 draft and things did improve dramatically. They really listened to the community, and the language in it now is much clearer. So what I want to do now is talk a little bit through what WCAG2 includes and what it doesn’t, and how we’re then going to go about implementing it and how it affects us.

Principles

Paul: Ok, so let’s look at the structure of WCAG2. Basically WCAG2 has 3 tiers to it that you need to know about. Tier number 1 is the idea of Principles. So this is kind of the most generic of the tiers, you know, it’s really kind of aimed at the kind of things you would tell a board of directors that doesn’t really understand anything technical, that doesn’t really understand accessibility at all. And there are 4 principles which are the foundations of web accessibility and these principles I’ll come onto a little bit later.

Guidelines

Paul: Underneath each of those principles are Guidelines. So, within each principle there are 3 or 4 guidelines or a number of guidelines that is different for each principle. But there are a total of 12 guidelines, and these are goals that you should be working towards in order to make your content more accessible to users.

Success Criteria

Paul: Under each guideline, there are Success Criteria. So now we’ve really hit the nitty-gritty, these are kind of specific, measurable goals that you’ve got to achieve. And this is how you judge whether your site is WCAG2 compliant, if you like. So, this is the really important level if that makes sense, but it’s organised within this hierarchy of guidelines and principles.

Techniques

Paul: Now, actually, there is kind of a 4th tier as well which is techniques. So you’re trying to, maybe as designers, you’re trying to conform to the Success Criteria, well there’s a whole load of different ways and different techniques that you can do that and you could read about those, and you could make up your own techniques if you wanted to, but there are some laid down that can help you get going.

Working with WCAG2

Paul: So those are the 3 levels that WCAG2 is built around. Now let’s dive into those a little bit. I had to think about how much detail I want to go into in this room. Obviously we don’t want to go into every technique that you could possibly apply and we don’t even want to go into necessarily every success criteria. That’s really for you guys to look through afterwards. What we are going to do is look at those guidelines and those principles, and hopefully help you to understand where WCAG2 stands over stuff.

Perceivable

Paul: Ok, so, the first… heh, totally illegible text, isn’t that great. Very accessible!

Audience: (laughter)

Paul: So the number 1 principle is Perceivable, and that’s 1 of your 4 principles that you’ve got here. And perceivable is basically talking about “information and user interface components must be presentable to users in ways that they can perceive”

Audience: (laughter)

Paul: Unlike that! (points to presentation)

Audience: (laughter) Is the rest of the presentation like this?

Paul: Yes.

Audience: (more laughter)

Paul: You actually don’t need to read this anyway which is very useful. So, Perceivable is basically about “can you see it?”, that is it as far as the principle is concerned, and the answer is “no you can’t”. But perceivable then breaks down into a series of guidelines. So, let’s have a look at what these guidelines are. So basically, perceivable is broken down into 4 guidelines. And if we talk through each of those it should give you an idea.

Text Alternatives

Paul: The first one is text alternatives. So this is stuff we already know. “Provide text alternatives for any non-text content so that it can be changed into other forms people need, such as large print, braille, speech, symbols or simpler language.” So this really applies to things like video, audio, forms that you create, and interestingly CAPTCHA is particularly mentioned here. And that is a particular accessibility problem that hasn’t been particularly well solved I don’t think.

Time Based Media

Paul: The next way that Perceivable works itself out is in time-based media. What we’re talking about here is that you need to provide an alternative for anything that is time-based. So here we’re talking about captions for video, sign-language maybe, media alternatives, but it also applies to live and pre-recorded video. So if you’re streaming stuff, then you need to think about this as well as with stuff that’s pre-recorded. Now, it does take into account the difference between “crap, how are we going to make streaming video accessible?”. If you read into the guidelines it does give some good advice there. So that’s not quite as scary as it first sounds.

Adaptable

Paul: Anything that we produce needs to be adaptable. In other words, content can be presented in different ways. For example, a simpler layout maybe for people with cognitive disabilities for example. Really, this boils down to things like using semantic markup, meaningful order in your HTML so that if the CSS is stripped away it still makes sense in the order that it is presented, and not relying on colour and other sensory elements to convey information.

Distinguishable

Paul: And then finally it’s got to be distinguishable. So it’s about making it easier for users to see and hear content including separating foreground from background and that kind of stuff. So we’re talking here about contrast, colour, and control over things like audio and video, that kind of stuff. So that’s where we’re at with perceivable.

Operable

Paul: Let’s move onto the next principle which is Operable. So, Operable is about user interface components and navigation, and making them easy to use so that somebody can use them whatever disability they may have. So this again breaks down into 4 different guidelines, the most obvious of which is Keyboard Access. So everything that we produce has to be accessible via a keyboard. So, for example, the Flash video that we’re currently creating for the Wiltshire Farm Foods home page needs to be keyboard operated, alright? Which I bet it isn’t at the moment! And to be fair, it’s part of production, I’m sure they’d put that in at the end if I hadn’t reminded them. That existed under WCAG1, so there’s nothing different there. So everything needs to be keyboard accessible.

Enough Time

Paul: You also need to provide enough time for people to take in the information that they’re being presented with. So giving the ability to pause, stop and control time based material is really important as well.

Seizures

Paul: You’ve got to take into account seizures, some people can have seizures triggered by animation and that kind of thing, so there are various limits that the guidelines lay down about flashing objects and stuff like that.

Navigable

Paul: And then finally it’s got to be navigable. So this includes things like skipping content, having descriptive page titles, tab order, links that make sense out of context, lot’s of headings, that kind of stuff. Is this all making sense?

Audience: Yes, apart from time-based media, I don’t understand that.

Paul: Time-based media, we’re talking about video and audio. So let’s say you had… one of our podcasts. So, there are certain things we need to ensure. One is that it is operable, in other words, a user can pause the podcast if we get annoying, or they want time to take in the information that we’ve said, but the other thing is that we also need to provide an alternative way of them getting it which is why we provide the show notes that we do and the transcripts and stuff like that.

Audience: Ok, well that kind of fits under Text Alternatives and giving it control so it’s under Operable… I just don’t get where it is under perceivable, as a perceivable thing, it has to be perceivable?

Paul: Yeah, basically.

Audience: Video, audio… all has to be perceivable then?

Paul: Yes. Some of these principles and certainly some of the guidelines do overlap to some degree. But when you draw down to the Success Criteria level, of how you actually apply these things, then there are more specific techniques. I think what they did is create a load of success criteria, and then kind of chunked them together in meaningful groups, but sometimes they’re not so meaningful. But it is a vast improvement on WCAG1 as far as being able to understand it.

Understandable

Paul: Ok, talking of understanding it, our next one is Understandable. So this is the next one of our 4 top-level principles, so everything you produce has to be understandable. So what does that mean? Well that results in 3 guidelines. It has to be Readable, Predictable and has to be able to provide Input Assistance. So how does that work itself out in practice?

Readable

Paul: With Readable, we’re talking about making content readable, text content mainly. So this works out in things like setting the language in your HTML, you know, setting what the language is in the header, avoiding using jargon, finally we’ve got a decent reason to go back to clients and say, you know, “you can’t use that kind of language, nobody understands it!”. Also things like abbreviations need to be explained, and also reading level as well, and that’s something I really want to get through to a lot of our clients because a lot of our clients, especially the public sector clients that we have, have this attitude of “well of course, people that look at our site are of post-graduate degree people, and they have excellent reading level”, but that doesn’t take into account things like people that speak English as a 2nd language, who can be very intelligent but not particularly good at reading, also people with Dyslexia can be incredibly intelligent but not particularly good at reading. So reading level is an important aspect of it.

Predictable

Paul: For it to be understandable it also needs to be predictable. So with this we’re talking about things like consistent navigation, and no uninitiated changes. And this is a particularly important one in our world of AJAX and JavaScript and all this cool stuff that we’re doing where we can often trigger events without asking the user’s permission first. When I say “asking for permission” I mean they haven’t clicked on link or they’ve not initiated it in any way. Users need to initiate these actions… and no pop-up windows without them clicking first to trigger a pop-up and being aware of what’s going to happen. It’s all about making it understandable and making them aware of what’s going on.

Input Assistance

Paul: The last guideline under Understandable is Input Assistance. So this is going into the realms of when we do forms, how do we handle errors, what kind of feedback do we give to the user, what labels – are things clearly marked up as labels, are they descriptive of the fields and the forms and that kind of stuff. We’re also talking about help, what additional help are you provided in terms of tool tip and contextual help and anything else that you care to mention. So that’s Understandable, that’s what that principle is driving at.

Robust

Paul: The final principle is Robust. “Content must be robust enough that it can be interpreted reliably by a wide variety of user agents, including assistive technologies.” In other words, what we build has to work on everything.

Audience: What about AJAX?

Paul: I think that’s where we get into the realm of progressive enhancement, that it’s fine to use something like AJAX as long as, if the AJAX is taken away, it still operates. Or, you provide an alternative version, the guidelines do actually accept that you can do alternative versions of something. So Gmail is a good example of that, Gmail, it actually doesn’t work if AJAX is turned off but they do provide an HTML only version of it which does the same thing. I’m not a great fan of that because it’s twice as much stuff to maintain, and one version become out of date and all the rest of it. My preferred technique is to build it so it works normally, and then to layer on the JavaScript and AJAX on top of it to provide enhanced functionality, which is what we guys have been doing pretty much all along and we need to continue in doing that.

Compatibility

Paul: So that Robust principle actually only comes down to one guideline which is Compatible, so that’s about maximising compatibility with current… listen to the wording of this… Maximise compatibility with current and future user agents, so we also need to be looking forward as well and predicting the future which is always good. But that’s where it comes back to using solid, good code that is’nt reliant on lots of hacks in order to get it to work, and it goes back to the conversation that we’ve been having recently about browser testing, upgraded browser support and that kind of stuff as well. So Compatibility and Robustness is the last principle. The other thing I should have mentioned with Compatibility is this also includes things like validation, making sure that your code validates, and just generally other markup type stuff.

What, no AAA, AA, A?

Paul: Ok, another thing that might have occurred to you is AAA, AA, A.. Priority 1, 2 and 3. Priority 1, 2 and 3 are still there, there are still those levels of conformance, but I get a real sense from the tome of this document, and this is just my personal opinion, people watching this video who know a lot more about accessibility might jump all over me on this, but my sense is that they were playing down those 3 levels of conformance. To be honest, I think I’m pretty keen on that. I don’t think those levels of conformance have done a lot of good generally speaking, because I think it’s kind of developed a checkbox mentality amongst some of our clients “We must be AA compliant” or “We must be A compliant” and they’re not actually thinking about the needs of the users, they’re just ticking the boxes so they meet some quota that has been established somewhere. One of the things that’s quite interesting, and I’m not sure if it’s a change from WCAG1 or not, I couldn’t find the reference in WCAG1 but again someone will correct me no doubt, but conformance in WCAG2 seems to be on a page-by-page basis. So you’re no longer in a situation where you want to claim conformance so you’re claiming conformance for an entire site, but you’re rather conforming on a page-by-page basis. And this allows you to basically pick-and-mix the level of conformance you want to reach on any particular page which is much, much more sensible because there are some elements where you might be building a particularly complex application that really isn’t going to manage being AAA compliant, whereas the rest of the site is AAA, and this one page isn’t. So it’s giving you the ability to mix and match. In fact, in the guidelines it says “It is not recommended that Level AAA conformance be required as a general policy for entire sites because it is not possible to satisfy all Level AAA Success Criteria for some content. In other words they’re saying it’s just not possible to be AAA in some situations, so don’t even try.

Start With Basics

Paul: So how does this relate to what we do on a day-to-day basis? Well, I think the language we use with our clients pretty much will remain consistent with how it was with WCAG1 which is that we need to start of by encouraging all our clients to start with the absolute basics. A lot of people are put off of accessibility because of the enormity of it, of all the things they’ve got to do. And even to be single A compliant there is quite a lot to do if you’ve got a site that has never been built to be single A compliant before. So I think our attitude has got to be that you work towards this over time, it is an ongoing process, you don’t need to do it all in one big go and that you need to start with the absolute basics, the quick wins, the stuff… you know, it’s the 80/20 rule, 80% of the problems that people are going to encounter from an accessibility point of view is caused by 20% of the accessibility issues if that makes sense. So we can solve a small number of issues but have a big impact on the site. So we’ll start off with some real basic stuff. Things like putting in “alt” and “title” attributes, providing alternatives to media, things like video and audio, being aware of JavaScript and the problems that JavaScript can create if it’s not implemented correctly, providing resizable text so that the user has the ability to either increase or decrease the text size on sites, to build everything to be standards based because that makes it so much easier in future.

Audience: Aren’t we moving away from resizable text?

Paul: We’re moving away from the resizable interface where the whole thing scales up and down, but there’s no reason why we can’t keep the text itself rescaleable. The layers should be able to push up and down. It has to be said with resizeable text, it is becoming less of an issue. The reason it’s becoming less of an issue is because browsers now have this zoom functionality built into them. But I don’t think we’re quite there yet to be able to drop resizable text entirely is my current feeling… I’ve got mixed feelings about it. But the obvious aim we’re going for here is to be single A compliant.

Build Over Time

Paul: So all of this is about building accessibility over time. Taking the guidelines by themselves is not going to be enough, and taking this checkbox mentality that I talked about earlier is not going to be enough. Once you’ve done these quick fixes, the next step on from that is to start consulting with your community. We need to encourage our clients to start talking to their users and find out what accessibility concerns they have. I also think, which I think we’re quite poor at, that we need to start testing with real users some of the accessibility stuff that we do, and the big problem there is persuading clients to pay for that. It’s really hard to get clients to pay for that kind of testing but I do think that it’s a really useful thing to do, and there are organisations out there that provide people you can get in to do testing, or that you can send sites out and they test with them. So, testing with real disabled users is really worthwhile. I think it’s about identifying major issues and dealing with those first, just pragmatic kind of prioritisation of issues, something you do with usability. With usability you look for the quick wins and the showstoppers and those you deal with first, exactly the same with accessibility. Now, what the major showstoppers are for those navigating the site need to be dealt with. And over time you build towards AA and AAA compliance if you can. But you only do that maybe on some pages. The big concern clients have and the reason they get into this check-box mentality of saying “we’ve got to be double A or we’ve got to conform to the WCAG guidelines” is fear, a fear of litigation. Especially our bigger clients, they’re really worried they’re going to get serious issues. But I think it’s important to stress with clients that litigation doesn’t happen overnight. You don’t suddenly have come through the post a writ saying “you need to come into court about this accessibility issue on your site”. It doesn’t happen like that. What happens in reality is the user complains. And if the user is repeatedly not heard and not listened to, and not responded to and not cared about and rejected, they get angry enough to maybe approach someone like the RNIB who then take it on into litigation for them. That’s the reality of what happens.

Quick Response

Paul: So as a result, you can diffuse that by responding to complaints quickly. So as you’re building up over time with the accessibility policy, if someone does complain, you need to write back to them and you need to deal with that issue straight up. Ok, so that’s how the client should be dealing with all this and there’s loads more I could say on this but I don’t want it to go on forever.

Headscape’s Approach

Paul: Let’s briefly talk about Headscape and our approach and how we should be approaching the subject of accessibility.

Establish Approach With Client

Paul: Well first of all I think everything that we do in our approach should be in conjunction with the client. I don’t think necessarily we talk enough to the client about accessibility. Some clients are just so bamboozled by it that they want us to take control, others want a say in it and what to be reassured that we’re doing something about it. So I think there’s a dialogue that we need to make sure happens. And if a client just wants us to take control of it, that’s great. If they want to be involved in the process, then that’s great to but we need to engage with the client and talk to the client more about it.

Remain Pragmatic

Paul: The second thing and I think this is really important is that we need to remain pragmatic in our approach to accessibility. Everything I’ve been talking about before like building up accessibility gradually, about doing the quick wins first and the show stoppers and that kind of stuff, that’s all pragmatic. I don’t want us on one hand to ignore accessibility, and it needs to be an integral part of everything we do, but on the other hand you can become extremist about it. We could spend hours and hours trying to get something to work in every conceivable user agent in the world and we can worry about every type of disability to the point where it becomes like a paralysis that stops us actually doing anything. So there’s a real balance that we need to strike here. And we need to strike that with our clients and working with our clients.

Have a rationale

Paul: Now I think it’s worth saying that if we decide not to comply with a guideline for whatever reason, we need to have a rationale for that. So we might not conform even to single A compliance in certain situations, although to be honest I can’t think of any off the top of my head, but if we do decide not to conform, we need a damned good reason why not. In other words, we need to have thought about it. And the other thing about accessibility is that we always think about it at the end of the project. It’s too late by then, we’ve built everything. So it really needs to become an intrinsic part of everything that we do.

Responsibilities.

Paul: Let’s talk about the idea of responsibility here and whose responsibility accessibility is within Headscape. Basically I’m going to say, everybody. One of the absolute great things about WCAG2 is because it’s got this 3 tiered approach, it is “accessible” to everybody. It’s understandable by everybody. So therefore it can be everybody’s responsibility to keep an eye on accessibility. And so this is how I think it should split down.

Sales/Client – Principles

Paul: Marcus and Chris and the Client should be worried about principles. The Operable, the Perceivable, those basic top-level principles. And you should be looking at anything that goes out from the company and going “well is that really operable?” So you can take a very top-level approach to it. And I think as you talk to clients as well you take this very top-level approach to it. That’s the level you guys should be working at.

Guidelines – Project Managers

Paul: Project managers, I think you need to be looking and understanding from the guidelines point of view. So you need to go in and read what those guidelines are, and you need to be sure that you understand them. And as you look at any work that goes out from the company, you need to be thinking “does it conform to those guidelines?” You don’t necessarily care about the nitty-gritty of how those are measured, or the nitty-gritty of how they’re achieved, but has that guideline been met? That’s the level you need to be working at.

Success Criteria – Designers and Developers

Paul: Then when it comes to the designers and developers, you need to get right into these guidelines. And you need to understand the success criteria and how to apply the guideline and how to make them work in practice.

Check Everything

Paul: So basically, we need to be checking everything that goes out the company for accessibility. And I have to say I’m making the mistake of saying this on camera, but I think we’ve got a bit lax recently when it comes to accessibility. We reached a point where it was becoming quite intuitive to us, and we were doing it quite naturally, and then as a result of that, we stopped checking because it was the natural process of what we were doing, and then bad habits start to seep in again. So WCAG2 is a great opportunity for us to say “ok, we need to start reviewing everything we’re doing as it goes out again”. So I’d really, really encourage you to check everything.

Needs to be second nature

Paul: basically we need to get to the point where this is second nature to us, so that we’re doing this intuitively again, but not to the point where we’re no longer checking.

Audience: Clients often say “what’s the difference? If I just got for single A compliancy, what won’t my site be reaching?”

Paul: I have to say that I think I would stop talking about double A, triple A and single A compliancy. I don’t think there’s really any value any more in talking about that to the clients.

Audience: I think there is because having the page by page conformance is a really good thing and that we can now argue that yes, we can now make the majority of your site triple A compliant, but for a page full of videos, we can make it single A compliant.

Paul: Ok

Audience: Clients will continue to reference it in briefs. You can’t not talk about it.

Audience: I think it’s actually quite a strong thing.

Audience: is it a page by page compliance, or template by template compliance?

Paul: I think it has to be page by page because the content that goes into the page, into the template, could invalidate it. This is why I think it’s something that should be downplayed. I accept the clients will still talk to us about it, but clients still talk to us about doing speculative design, it doesn’t mean we do it. I think there’s an education thing there whereby we need to move clients away from being obsessed by double A, single A compliance, and to start thinking about accessibility policies. What is there accessibility policy and what is it that they are trying to achieve on their site? Our base mark is going to be single A, it’s always single A, and I think it should continue to be single A.

Audience: but if you don’t talk to them about it, you could argue that less caring clients would just say “well why would I do anything about it, bottom line?”

Paul: Yeah, I said you shouldn’t talk about single A, double A, triple A, but that doesn’t mean you can’t talk to them about accessibility and the improvements that accessibility brings because for people that have got that sort of attitude you don’t want to talk about the disabled if they don’t care about the disabled, you talk about search engines, and that’s the best way to sell accessibility, by talking about search engine placement. That’s the reason you want to be accessible for people who have that kind of attitude. For those that care, and are talking about single A, double A and triple A, you need to say to them “well actually, conforming with any level, it’s great that you want to do accessibility, and certainly single A should be an absolute minimum, but we’d encourage you to start working up an accessibility policy and looking at your site as a whole and say could this area do more in your site, your accessibility policy should do real world testing with real users…” all kinds of things.

Audience: So you think that we should be encouraging large organisations that have accessibility policies themselves that refer to double A, triple A, to try and persuade them to kind of move away from that?

Paul: No, not necessarily, I wouldn’t go that far. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that they’re a bad thing, I’m saying they’re not the be-all and end-all. And at the moment I feel like the vast majority of clients think they are the be-all and end-all. They’re obsessed with putting that little badge on the bottom of the page. And it’s not about putting badges on the page. The trouble with institutions that have these policies of single A, double A and triple A is that these policies are in place for the institution, not for the user. And that’s my problem with them. That’s why I think we should try to break that mentality with clients. And I accept that sometimes we’re going to lose, and that’s fine. Exactly the same goes when we were talking about browser support. I accept sometimes we’re going to lose that battle as well. But it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try and fight it.

Audience: I just wondered why WCAG2 still does it, because yes, you’re right basically, and accessibility requirements should be based on user requirements and not ticking boxes, so why is it still in there?

Paul: I think it’s in there because… my impression… I hate talking about accessibility on camera! You remember what happened last time in the podcast? It was just a nightmare! I think the reason it’s still in is because some of those success criteria are hard to meet. Some of them are damn difficult. When you start talking about streaming video, you’ve got some difficult challenges there that need to be met. So I think as a result, what the W3C is saying there is that we accept that some of these things are difficult to do. And we accept that you’re not always going to be able to do them, so we’re going to make them triple A. But come on guys, some of this stuff is dead simple and we should be doing it, that’s single A. That’s my impression of the mentality behind it, and that’s a great mentality, but it’s when someone changes that to being guidelines, which is what they are, to being rules, really instilled by Moses and presented to the people. You know it’s not that and I think that’s an important differentiation to make.

Where to Start

Paul: I know what you guys are like, especially designers. Ok I’m making sweeping generalisations here. But, if you guys go along to the WCAG website and you look at the WCAG2 guidelines, it’s horrible! It’s intimidating and it’s scary and it goes on for pages. And there’s a lot of text around it.

Audience: There’s no pictures? (laughter)

Paul: There’s no pictures! The design isn’t even very good. So what I’ve done is I’ve taken that page, I’ve literally all I’ve done is I’ve stripped out the explanation text in front of it, and the waffle at the end of it, and I’ve left you with just the set of guidelines so it looks like a slightly less intimidating list. Not much but slightly. So that’s up at http://www.headscape.co.uk/WCAG2 so if you go to that, you can get just the actual list of criteria. There’s also, on the WCAG2 website, there’s a thing where you can go and you can say my site uses tables, my site uses video, my site has this and that, and you untick the ones that it doesn’t have and it narrows down the list of success criteria to only show you the ones that you need to care about. So you might want to check that one out as well. Ok, so that’s basically all I have to say, are there any other questions before we wrap up?

Questions

Audience: Clients are going to ask us the 1 minute elevator pitch. What’s the difference between WCAG2 and WCAG1? What would you highlight as differences?

Paul: I think there’s a bigger acceptance of things in the world other than HTML, so things like Flash, PDFs, all that kind of stuff, there’s much more reference to that kind of thing. It’s much better written, much better organised. I think it’s more pragmatic. It’s a little bit more… I think it will last the test of time more. It’s hard to pin down exactly what I mean by that. There is actually a document out that talks about the specific differences between WCAG1 and WCAG2 if you wanted to get into that level of detail. And to be honest, I couldn’t tell you what that is yet because I haven’t looked at it in that much depth myself.

Audience: I think you and I do need a couple of the more detailed stuff, to get the guidelines, just one or two examples basically. Something that’s new between WCAG1 and WCAG2, and also some of the differences between single A, double A and triple A. The streaming video is an excellent example.

Paul: Just go along to http://www.headscape.co.uk/WCAG2 and you’ll be able to see those different levels.

Audience: It seems like, an almost unwritten principle, or unwritten in your list of principles. It’s technology agnostic.

Paul: WCAG2 started off as so technologically agnostic that it wasn’t understandable.

Audience: WCAG1, the first line is all about “it must be W3C technologies”.

Paul: Yeah, it will pretty much accommodate anything. You know, it talks in terms of audio and video. It doesn’t mention Flash for example specifically, at least I don’t think it does, but it refers to those kinds of things. It refers to documents that are not HTML. I’m saying this as much for the video as anything else, I’m still learning about it as well. So I think it’s going to be a learning process for a while for us to really get to grips with this, and truth be told we probably should have started a little sooner than this, but it’s not radically different from WCAG1. This is as much getting us back into the habit of thinking about accessibility as anything else really. Ok?

Audience: 1 more question. Are they new Keynote animations?

Paul: Yeah, they are new Keynote animations.

149. White Hat

Posted in Classic shows on by Paul Boag

On this week’s show: How to become number one on Google *cough*, are customer testimonials worth it and how do you create a reassuring website.

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Housekeeping

Some housekeeping to kick off today’s show I am afraid:

Web Design Introductory Training

Drew and Rachel over at EdgeOfMySeat.com are running two training courses next month that look ideal for those starting out in web design. What is more they are offering boagworld listeners 10% off if they enter the promo code ‘boagworld’ at checkout.

The two courses are…

HTML and Web Standards for Beginners – 19th February

a one day course ideally suited to those wanting to get into web design, or perhaps for clients who have to format content with HTML for their websites. Covers the basic web standards principals of semantic markup and separation of content, structure and presentation.

Beginners CSS – 20th February

a one day course for learning CSS from the ground up. We go from zero knowledge right through to building floated, positioned and fixed width layouts.

For more information visit edgeofmyseat.com/training/

Bamboo Juice

Next up is a conference I am really excited to be speaking at. It called Bamboo Juice and is a one day conference taking place at the Eden Project in Cornwall. There is a growing line up of speakers that currently includes people like Jeremy Keith and myself.

It is great to see conferences happening further afield in the UK and I really want to see this one succeed. Please support it if you can. Cornwall is a stunning place and the Eden Project is a must visit. You ticket includes entry to the Eden Project so you will have a chance to look around.

Best of all the entire conference only costs £99! Please, please join us. Its going to be great fun and it should have a nice intimate feel with lots of time for chatting.

You can book your ticket now at bamboojuice.co.uk.

Consultancy Competition

Just a reminder of our free consultancy competition. Headscape are giving away a free days consultancy to a lucky winner. Email us with your name, URL and why you want us to help you out. We will pick a winner at the end of the month.

If you can’t wait that long Paul has started running mini-consultancy clinics via Skype. You can buy 30 minutes or more of Paul’s time and he will chat with you about your site, career or anything else (within reason). Its a bit of an experiment at the moment so if you are interested in trying it out visit the Boagworld forum where he talks more about the idea.

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News and events

More on jQuery

If you listen to this show regularly then no doubt you will be aware of what a huge jQuery fan I am. I was therefore super excited this week to see the release of a new version of jQuery that builds on what is already an excellent Javascript library.

Most of the improvements are in performance. This is remarkable as jQuery was already one of the most lightweight and speedy libraries available. However, they seem to have made some significant improvements.

The main new piece of functionality is something called Live Events. Live Events allows you to bind events (such as a onclick event) to all elements even if they have yet to be created. Let me give you an example. Let’s say you wanted all links with a class=’external’ to open in a new window. Previously you would create a function that added an event to all links with that class so that when the link was clicked it opened a new window. The problem was that if you added more links dynamically to the page you would have to rerun the function if you wanted them to behave in the same way. With live events this is no longer necessary. This is a huge improvement and one that will streamline a lot of code.

I really cannot say enough good things about jQuery. It really is enormously powerful and a real time saver. What you can do with it is quite amazing as is demonstrated by a post from Smashing Magazine this week entitled "45+ New jQuery Techniques For Good User Experience". Whether you use jQuery already or not, check this post out. It will definitely give you loads of ideas for enhancing your sites.

Getting started with HTML 5

Talking of new releases, there is a significant amount of buzz surrounding HTML 5 at the moment. This is somewhat surprising considering it is a long way from being finished and some even argue we do not need it in its current form.

Cameron Moll does a nice job of providing a round up of what is currently being written about HTML 5 including a nice little summary at the beginning…

The world isn’t ready for HTML 5 at large just yet, but we can begin preparing for it by using common, semantic selector names (header, nav, section, etc.)

To be honest it is still early days for HTML 5 with some estimating it will be released in 2022 some estimating that it will not be fully implemented by browsers until 2022. With those kind of timescales we can afford not to care. Jeff Croft puts it up nicely in his post "Two Thousand and Twenty Two" where he says…

It ultimately doesn’t matter if HTML 5 is available next month, next year, or fifty years from now. Those of us who do real work in this industry know that the only thing that really matters is what specs and technologies are supported by the browsers real people use.

Jeff came under a lot of attack for his post but I have to say I agree with him. What matters to real web designers and real website owners is what browsers will support now. So my advice is to ignore HTML 5 now and brush up on your WCAG 2 instead!

Web design trends for 2009

We turn now to the more immediate future and a post by the people over at Smashing Magazine. "Web Design Trends of 2009" endeavours to look at emerging trends that could become mainstream over the coming year.

To be honest I am not sure these are some much web design trends of 2009, as a look back at the end of the last year. However, it makes interesting reading none the less.

The trends listed include…

  • Use of letterpress typography, where text is ‘punched out’ of the background
  • An increase in the richness of user interfaces through the use of Javascript
  • The general acceptance of PNG transparency
  • Big bold typography
  • An increased use of font replacement using tools like sFIR
  • More sites than ever using overlay boxes to display images and video
  • A proliferation of video and screencasts
  • Blogs adopting a more magazine orientated design aesthetic
  • Lots of Javascript slideshows wherever you look

Nothing particularly surprising, but the article does provide some inspiring examples of these different trends and analysis about wh
y they are becoming fashionable.

Your website can thrive in a recession

We conclude today with another post about the recession. To be honest I am getting sick of talking about it. In fact I suspect it is turning into a self fulfilling prophesy. However, Gerry McGovern has written an interesting post about how your website could thrive in a recession.

The article mainly focuses on the cost savings that can be made by bringing customer interactions online. He quotes research which states:

the average cost of a web interaction is 27 pence, the average cost of a phone interaction is 3.76 Sterling and the average cost of a face-to-face interaction is 9.34 Sterling.

He goes on to say:

So, it is 14 times cheaper to allow a customer to complete a task on a website than to have the customer complete the same task over the phone. The Web is 35 times cheaper for completing such a task than a face-to-face interaction. Isn’t that a compelling business case for a website during a recession?

It is an interesting argument and one that may sway some of the people holding the purse strings. However it fails to take into account the upfront development cost of moving customer interactions online. For better or worse companies are focusing on short term cost savings at the moment rather than long term expenses. As a result some web design projects are being put on hold.

Nevertheless if you work for an organisation that deals with a large number of customers then this article is a powerful arguement. It is certainly something that you need to show your boss.

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Feature: Becoming Number One On Google

‘Become number one on Google’ – The dream of every website owner and titles like that grab people’s attention. What can you do to help achieve that dream without resorting to black hat techniques? Read More

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Listeners feedback:

Customer testimonials – Are they worth it?

Question from Dave Rupert –

“Client Testimonials” – whenever some marketing aficionado comes up with these they want them on the site. When was the last time you thought “OOOOH CLIENT TESTIMONIALS!! OMFGWTFBMXBBQ!!1!” and clicked to go see a whole page of them? Are these out of date? Does anyone care about them? Are there examples of good implementation? Do you use Client Testimonials on your site? If so, why?

This is a good question because it has made me question something that I have always considered to be a really good thing on websites.

I think someone in Dave’s position – who I assume is a web developer/owner – won’t ever get excited about a list of client testimonials. Let’s face it, they’re not for Dave. They’re meant for visitors to the site to try and persuade them that buying a product or hiring a service is a good idea. The idea is that customers are far more likely to trust a testimonial from an existing client than the marketing speak on a website.

But this is where I have started to question my thinking. For example: “I am Mr X from company Y and I have to tell you that after using these people’s services I am now a better, more rounded person and I have decided to name my first-born after the MD”… this rather points to the fact that Mr X is the MD’s brother/drinking buddy/receiver of folding in a reverse handed way (delete as appropriate)… or even the MD himself!

So, do potential customers place any value in testimonials or do they instantly think they are fiction. In my opinion, I do still think they have value, particularly if you back up an online testimonial with that particular client’s contact details in a proposal. I also think that video testimonials have more value than written ones because (unless they are a complete setup) you will be getting the client’s real feelings and you can watch their body language.

Slightly going of point, regarding providing client contact details for inclusion in a proposal, I have started to ask potential new clients which of our existing clients they would like to talk to rather than simply providing a list chosen by me. I think this adds a further degree of trust.

Fundamentally, I do still think testimonials are a good thing and we will continue to use them on our site. But I don’t think I will be placing so much importance on them as I used to.

How do you make your site feel safe

Kevin Dees asks an interesting question on the forum:

I don’t know if this question has been asked before but I’m interested in what other designers have done to help make a site "feel safe".

Many times I find myself leaving e-commerce sites… because they do not feel safe. I find that this is due to poor design. Big flashing buttons and the like make me wonder if I’m going to get scammed.

So, I guess what my question is "how, as a designer, do you make your site feel safe, welcoming, and secure with the design itself? What are good practices? How do you make users go were you want them to, yet make them feel like they are still in control? What do you suggest adding or even keeping way from when it comes to design"

The answers he got in the forum didn’t really address his question. They focused on the realities of making a site safe (security and technology) rather than on the perception of security.

A site maybe the safest in the world but if the design isn’t right you are left with doubts. Take for example the new US government site that allows people to apply for visa waivers every time they travel to the US. One would hope that a site collecting that amount of personal data would be extremely secure but the design leaves you wondering if it is legitimate. It just doesn’t ‘feel’ professional.

I have spent a long time trying to come up with an answer for Kevin. However, I have found it hard to define what provides that sense of security. Part of the problem is that I think as a web designer I am more sensitive to the ‘vibe’ a site gives off than the average user. I am not sure I am best placed to judge.

Also, a lot of the things that occurred to me where content issues more than design. Delivery policy, site security, returns policy etc. are all content issues and so do not answer Kevin’s question.

However a few things have come to mind…

  • An attention to detail – Sites that lack an attention to detail always make me nervous. Poor browser support, bad grammar, inconsistencies and ill considered design reek of unprofessionalism. If I am going to spend my money on a site, I want to know that money and time has been invested in its creation. If an organisation is shoddy in the production of their own site, then I can probably expect the same attitude in the way they interact with me!
  • Structure – I think a strong grid structure is very reassuring. It conveys a sense of order that is disconcerting when not there. I think that is the problem I have with the US immigration site. The form you have to fill in is all over the place. Fields don’t line up and the site lacks any sense of order.
  • Colour – Misjudging colour can have a serious physiological effect on how we perceive a site. Some colours ar
    e naturally more trustworthy than others. Blue for example has a very safe reliable quality. However using a conservative blue on a site aimed at young girls will project entirely the wrong image and make the audience suspicious of your site.
  • Trying too hard – Some sites just try too hard, shouting for attention. Flashy graphics, heavy sales copy and advertising orientated imagery all scream desperation and manipulation. People do not like to be manipulated or pushed into responding. They like to move at their own pace. Push them too hard and they will run away.

I am not sure I have done particularly well at answering the question either, but hopefully there is something in there you might find useful.

 

144. Scale

Posted in Classic shows on by Paul Boag

On this week’s show Paul talks to Joe Stump from Digg about scalable websites, we review the best apps for web designers and investigate services for sending bulk emails.

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Podcast: Download (28.3MB)

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News and events

How much should you charge?

If you are starting your freelance career the number one question you will have is ‘how much should I charge?’ It is important and yet strangely it is not something you are taught at college. Perhaps they don’t teach it because it is a damn hard question to answer. It is certainly something we have avoided talking about on this show.

Fortunately an article entitled ‘Six things to consider when setting your freelance rate‘ has been released this week. Although the article does not give a magic number, it does provide 6 valuable insights that will inform your final decision. These include…

  • Young freelancers and recent grads almost always ask for too little.
  • You can do things your clients can’t.
  • Your rate influences your perceived value.
  • You don’t get to keep it all.
  • An hour worked is not an hour billed.
  • The higher you start, the less you’ll need to increase.

I couldn’t agree more with everything said in this article. However, the one that really resonated with me was ‘You do not get to keep it all.’ Your rate has not only got to cover your billable hours but the cost of sales and marketing, as well as your various overhead. The article has a link to a superb rates calculator that helps you work out your chargeable rate based on these various costs. Definitely worth checking out.

A plethora of accessibility posts

With the implement arrival of WCAG 2.0. we are seeing a resurgence of interest in accessibility. This has led to a plethora of accessibility posts over the last few weeks. These include…

  • Writing good ALT text – This is a simple post about the use of the ALT attribute. It suggests two rules of thumb when it comes to writing ALT text. First, if you were to describe the document to someone over the phone, would you mention the image or its content? If you would, the image probably needs an alternative text. Second, does the alternative text of any images in the document make sense if you turn off the display of images in your web browser? Simple advice, but well worth remembering.
  • Designing for Dyslexia – This is a series of 3 in depth articles that look at the subject of Dyslexia. It asks what Dyslexia is and how we as web designers can improve our sites to accommodate the needs of Dyslexia users. Its interesting stuff. Part 1 defines what Dyslexia is. Part 2 looks at some of the conflicting requirements with users who have visual impairments. Part 3 suggests some specific things you can do to improve the legibility of your designs.
  • Accessible forms using WCAG 2.0. – This extensive post aims to provide web developers and others with practical advice about the preparation of accessible HTML forms. It compares the WCAG 1.0 accessibility requirements relating to forms with those contained in WCAG 2.0. Important stuff but not a 5 minute read!
  • Too much accessibility – The RNIB explains how the LEGEND tag can cause more harm than good if not concise and relevant. The reason? LEGEND text isn’t read at the start of the FIELDSET, it is read at the start of the label. It repeats at the beginning of every single text label in that FIELDSET.

A business case for deleting content

I find myself using the word ‘simplify’ a lot when I talk to clients these days. So many website owners are constantly wanting to add features or content to their site. However, in reality we should be removing not adding to our already bloated websites. This is particularly true for large institutional websites. However it does also apply to smaller sites.

Take for example the Headscape website. When we started the redesign process for our site, I sat down and really thought through what information prospective clients wanted. The answer was very little. In the end our large text heavy website was reduced to a single page. That is the power of simplicity.

Gerrry McGovern summed it up perfectly this week in his post entitled the ‘Business case for deleting content‘. He wrote:

The more you delete, the more you simplify. The more you simplify, the more you increase the chances of your customers succeeding on your website.

We may think that we cannot delete content because ‘somebody might want it’ or because we believe ‘it will help our search engine ranking’. However, bloated sites bring complexity and with complexity comes confusion. The more content on your site, the less chance a user will be able to find the content they need.

12 principles for keeping your code clean

We finish today with a great post for those who need help with their HTML code. Whether you are a student learning HTML or a designer who is more comfortable in Photoshop than Coda, this is a very useful article.

The post provides 12 excellent tips for keeping your code clean. These include…

  • Use a strict doctype
  • Set your character set and encode those characters
  • Indent your code
  • Keep your CSS and JavaScript external
  • Nest your tags properly
  • Eliminate unnecessary divs
  • Use better naming conventions
  • Leave typography to the CSS
  • Add a class/ID to your BODY tag
  • Validate
  • Order your code logically
  • Just do what you can!

The article explores each of these points in depth and communicates clearly current best practice in coding HTML. Well worth the read even if only as a reminder.

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Interview: Joe Stump on Building a Scalable Site

Paul: Ok, so joining me today is Joe Stump from Digg. Good to have you on the show Joe.

Joe: Oh, good to be here.

Paul: Have we had you on the show before?

Joe: Ah, not that I’m aware of.

Paul: Oh, wow, well we need to rectify that then. It’s good to have you on. Well, I have to say, this interview was arranged by Ryan, who is our producer. And he’s a developer, and I’m a designer. And he suggested we got you on the show, not that I wouldn’t like you on the show, obviously. That we got you on the show, obviously about scaling websites. Now, I’m going to be out of my depth very quickly here, so you’re going to have to be very gentle with me Joe.

Joe: Sure

Paul: So, in fact, it was so bad, that as I sat down to write questions I thought: "I don’t know what I’m doing here" , so I went and talked to some of the developers at headscape, and I asked some of the Boagworld listeners, and so we’ve got a little selection of questions for you, that, hopefully we can learn a little bit about how you go about doing things at Digg. Lets start off, what’s your job title, what is it that you do at Digg?

Joe: Ah, I have a really fancy job title that doesn’t mean a lot of anything, but ah, my official job title is "Lead Architect" and um, I think what best describes it, is that I manage the technical implementation on the code side.

Paul: OK

Joe: So, Digg’s broken up into a lot of different arenas on the tech side, we’ve got, R&D, which is headed up by Anton Cast, we’ve got operations, which is headed up by Scott Baker, and then under that are the people that I work with, ah, probably most closely in implementing solutions for Digg. Ron Gorodetzky is our lead systems engineer, Tim Ellis, also known as timeless, is our chief DB wonk, and then, Mike Newton is our lead network guy. So I think us four kind of steer the technical implementation along. The managers, ah, the manage, and handle the strategy and partners, and stuff like that.

Paul: You managed to say the word manager with real distain.

Joe: Oh, no actually, I have a great manager, John Quinn, he’s our VP of engineering, he’s by far the best direct manager I’ve probably ever worked with. Yeah, he’s really good.

Paul: OK, well lets go back in time a little bit. And start by, well, when was the point when you realized, that you were going to start having scaling issues with Digg? When did you start thinking about the whole subject of scaling?

Joe: Um, well Digg was pretty big when I came on board, so Digg was about 10 – 12 million uniques when I joined on.

Paul: Wow.

Joe: And I think we’d just cleared 35 million last month. So scaling was obviously an issue, but the big difference is that, I think sites generally go through a few different levels of scaling, where like the first one’s like, "I’m just going to throw it on a virtual server, or an Amazon server, you know, you’re basically just seeing if things are going to just "stick to the wall", and then they do. Ah, so the first thing you normally do is start breaking services off onto separate boxes. I want to put my DB on one box, my server on another box, and maybe memcached on each of them. And then you hit, read saturation on that one DB server, so then you go to the kinda next level of scaling. Which is where Digg was when I started, where you start dangling, a whole bunch of read slaves, off of your DB master, so, and for those who are not familiar with the master / slave terms, you send all your writes to one database server, and then that disseminates those writes to a whole bunch of slaves, and then you send all your read traffic to those slaves. So that’s where Digg was when I started. It’s write http traffic across a whole bunch of servers, its read traffic across a whole bunch of slaves, and then we have one master. And we’re now going through, what I think is the third phase, where you hit write saturation on your master, which is a bigger problem, because you then need to start sending some write traffic to some masters, and we’re actually going with a strategy that’s common with Facebook, and Flickr, and those kind of websites, where it’s called horizontal partitioning, where you put some of your records on one server, and the other records on another, so it’s like, you can say, for users, all users whose names start with A through J, would go on this database server, and K to Z live on this other database server. So we’re in the middle of implementing the first swipe at that. So we’ll be pretty aggressively into where everything will be federated and partitioned across a whole bunch of servers.

Paul: OK, one of the questions which kinda came up, which kinda relates to that, is, once you start spreading things across multiple servers, how do you handle things like user sessions, which have obviously got to be persistent.

Joe: Aha, so there are a couple of ways to handle that which, I’d say most people are handling it by.. There’s two ways, probably that you can do it easily. One of them, is if you have what they call "session affinity" on your load balancer, so the load balancer will say: "Oh, well this person, last time I had them here, they went to server A, so we’ll send it back to that server". So the session always lives on only one box. That’s one way to do it, we don’t do that here, we have a custom session handler in PHP which sorts the session in Memcache, and that allows you to.

Paul: Can you just clarify what memcache is, for idiots like me who don’t know.

Joe: Sure, memcache is a distributed caching system that’s actually, basically what it allows you to do, is expose a machines RAM over the network, and cache stuff into another machines RAM across the network.

Paul: Ah, OK

Joe: Yeah, it’s insanely fast, it was developed by Danga back in the day, and Brice Fitzpatrick, yeah so it’s heavily used by anyone whose scaling with LAMP, even a lot of people who aren’t. They all use memcached.

Paul: Wow

Joe: So, yeah, we store all of our session data in memcached, so PHP creates a unique session id, and we just stuff session data into that in memcached, and we can distribute that across, I don’t know, 50 or 60 memcached servers, and what not.

Paul: So how many servers do you guys have, it must be a staggering number by now.

Joe: Um, yeah, it’s kinda funny, every time I ask Ron that, he’s always like "Ah, I don’t know"

Paul: Laughs

Joe: Because we really can’t I mean, I couldn’t give you a specific number because on any given day, we’ll pull or push into production, a dozen servers, so, hundreds, there’s definitely hundreds in production. So.

Paul: I mean, with that many servers, so obviously you’re talking about taking servers on and offline, and all that kind of thing, I mean, making updates to the site, when Daniel comes up with some stupid idea, that you’ve got to apply to the site, of a new feature that he wants to apply on the site, and you’ve gone through the process of making it work. And you’ve then got to push it live.

Joe: Aha

Paul: How does that work? How do you go about pushing something like that live when there are so many servers involved.

Joe: So we have Ron Gorodetzky our lead systems engineer guy. So us developers have a bunch of M4 make files, that, when you check the code out, you run basically Make, Install, and it, for lack of a better word, it builds or compiles the website into a cohesive package, and then Ron pushes that to each server, I think he is still doing it by rsynch, but I know we are migrating over to Puppet, so it may happen via Puppet soon. The production side of things, is something that’s handled completely by operations, so I couldn’t tell you specifically how it happens, but generally, we make a tag of the website, and tell Ron, we need you to push "9.4.15" or something like that, and he does a checkout, builds it, and pushes it to all of the different servers.

Paul: So is that – do you actually have to take the site offline to do those updates? How do you minimize the downtime that’s involved with that.

Joe: Oh, well there’s a bunch of different ways. Um, we don’t bring the website down normally for pushes, it depends on the size and complexity of the push. But like, day to day pushes, we probably push I guess, a minimum of once a day, just little bug fixes and stuff like that. And those happen generally in the middle of the day, and nobody notices, it’s no big deal. Ah, the outages these days, are completely dependant on database activity, you know, like database fixes and stuff like that. And the ways that we’re getting around that these days, is using a different method of partitioning called vertical partitioning. Where, like for instance, like I think our comment Diggs table, of like, who’s dug a comment, up or down, that’s like 15 billion records in it.

Paul: Wow

Joe: that’s like, yeah, if you’re like to alter that table, you’d probably crash mysql, but if you were, it would probably take a week to alter it. So instead we probably create another table, where we have like comments, and then we have another one called comments_made_up, or something like comments_diggs, comments_diggs_beta, and that has a couple of extra fields in it. And so we’ll say, OK, we’re about to push the code, at the end. When we push the code, the first comment id that was added to the table was 15,000,000,001, so then you start at 15,000,000,000 and work my way back in the table. So we do some of that live as well. For the next push that we’re doing, we’re using a migration table, which will tell us how far along each record is, and which records we’ve actually migrated, and stuff like that. And then we’re going to use this package called "GearMan" which is a queuing system which we’ve had in production for a while. And we’re basically turning our servers into a giant BotNet, so we’ll back fill all those partitions quickly.

Paul: Wow, that kind of amount of data, it must create huge problems, even adding a new piece of functionality onto the site, to actually code it in a way that’s not going to have a momentous impact on the database. This must be something that’s always constantly on your mind I guess?

Joe: Yeah, I’ll tell you a really funny story that highlights that perfectly, we have these little green badges that are on the Digg button, and they indicate, that a friend of yours has dug that story. And when you hover it shows the last four friends to dig it or something. So that’s a pretty knurly query, against a very big table, and we’ve actually had to, what I would call "dial it down a bit", so that it only shows up on the stories that are 48 hours old, and it won’t show up if there are more than 500 diggs or something. So the features fairly usable, but it’s not like… Well before if someone went to the top of 365, it was basically crashing our servers. So we’ve been rewriting that, and we basically, the way that we’re rewriting it is: If you write something, we take that Digg and we drop it into each of your followers buckets. So we make a bucket for each story for each person. Any time one of their friends digs it, we drop that dig into their bucket, but the problem is, like Kevin Rose is followed by 40,000 people, so every time he digs something, I need to drop 40,000 things into 40,000 different buckets. And we did the math, and just to get that feature up and running in a vast sane manner, so that it will scale, so we can bring it back in full capacity so everyone can use it all the time. We need 1.25 GB of storage, and we need to be able to sustain 3000 writes per second in order to keep just that small feature online.

Paul: So that really kind of illustrates that a relatively small feature that someone comes up with, has massive ramifications from your point of view.

Joe: Yeah, this is something that has kind of been something that I always talk about. I mean even back when I was doing consulting, I’d kind of have clients come to me, and it would be: "Check out this awesome design", and I would be like "that designs awesome, but that little feature down there, that’s going to cost you know, $100,000 in servers, and 500 man hours. But it’s, like, well the designers think of sizes and shapes, and so Daniel always jokes around and says: "Well I can make it purple" if that will make it easier for you" you know, it’s like…

Paul: Laughs

Joe: Laughs – well that doesn’t make it easier!

Paul: Well, we’re going to get you and Daniel back on the show to talk about this whole design / developer relationships, so you can lace your side of it now, and get your side in first. Before he defends himself.

Joe: Sounds like a plan.

Paul: So are you at the point now where you’ve got an architecture that’s kind of infinitely scalable, or are you going to have to go back to the drawing board if Digg just goes even more, you know off the scale than it already is?

Joe: Yeah, well we’re actually at the drawing board right now.

Paul: Yeah?

Joe: Yeah, Ron, myself, and some of the other senior peeps, about 8 or 10 months ago, we started putting together… well we knew that we were going to start to have serious limitations, especially since we were going to be scaling internationally. You know there is a problem with latency. With you guys across the pond hitting the west coast and other things like that. So we want to be in multiple data centers. We want to be actively serving traffic from multiple data centers, so we’re are, well we need to horizontally partition, we need to make sure we can do that. And we need to live in two different data centers. We need to be able to survive one data center disappearing. So we spent basically a week in front of the white board, and we created this thing called IDDB, which is kind of an elastic storage engine, built on top of SQL, and memcachedb, that we’re going to be putting the first bits and pieces into production, probably over a month or so. And really, the whole partitioning thing isn’t the difficult thing to figure out. The difficult thing is basically spanning multiple data centers, and also we’ll have a couple hundred gigabytes of data, and I need to spray that across, you know, a couple dozen different servers, without bringing the site down. So we have a couple million – 3 or 4 million users, and I need to take all of their records, and all of their auxiliary records, here’s like your user record, and there’s also a bunch of cruft related to that. So I need to take all of that, and migrate it to different partitions. But I need to do that while the site’s still up and running, and I need to do that without breaking the site for you. So, that’s the more complex problem at this point.

Paul: I mean you talk about spreading across multiple data centers, and if one of those data centers goes down, the site does too, and whatever. How are you currently handling redundancy? How are you making sure the site stands up at the minute?

Joe: Right now, our only single point of failure at this point, is our actual data center, so if the data center falls off the planet, then we’ve got problems. But we’ve got a general architecture. We’ve got a couple of general balancers up front. And those two have, what we call a "heartbeat" between them, and if one of them falls off, the other instantly takes over traffic for it. And that balances traffic across, I couldn’t even tell you, dozens and dozens of web servers, and of course, the load balancer does help checks on those, so if any of those falls over, it will drop it out of the pool. Behind that, we have, I think, 4, I guess our masters are technically single points of failure, but we have multiple masters as well, and we have dozens of read slaves hanging off of them. I think right now it takes about 10 minutes to bring a new master into production if one fails. So, and then we have, to store our files, we have a thing called MogileFS, which is a distributed web dav storage engine of sorts, and we can loose multiple nodes on that, and not have any problem with that as well.

Paul: Yeah, so at the moment it’s a physical problem that you have, that if your data center gets hit by an earthquake or whatever, then you have problems. Please tell me it’s not in San Francisco?

Joe: It’s not in San Francisco.

Paul: Ha ha, yeah, you’re not actually going to say where it is are you?

Joe: No I can say we have one on the west coast, and we have one on the east coast.

Paul: Oh, well that’s at least something. Um, I mean so far we’ve concentrated a lot on scaling technology, but there’s kind of another side to this, as well, where you get something like Digg, that has grown incredibly rapidly, over a very short length of time, and that is, kind of scaling the team behind it. You know, I don’t know how many developers were working on Digg when you joined it, but there would certainly be a heck of a lot more now. And I’m quite interested in how you went about growing the team. And how you deal with that kind of rapid growth, and making sure everyone knows what they’re working on, and not overwriting others work, and all the complexity that goes along side of that. How have you dealt with that?

Joe: Sure, I guess, to put things into context a little bit, when I was hired, we had both Kurt Wilms and I, were both hired on the same day, and were respectively employees 18 and 19, and developers, I think there were 7 of us. So, now we’re at the low 20′s as far as developers, and we’re in the mid 80s, as far as total employees, and that’s been in a year and 9 months. So as far as scaling the teams go, some of the building blocks were well in place by the time I got here. Like, source repository, stuff like that. But I think the crucial things that we’ve done, since I’ve come on board, that were, we had some coding standards that were out there, but they weren’t really in force. And then we had, we didn’t really have any frameworks in place. I think one of the problems, you know, when Jay, our CEO, was asking, where do we find more senior developers, I told Jay, like that’s not the right question, the right question is like, how do we get the code, and how do we get the technology, in a position, where we don’t have to hire really senior people. So I think the keys to that are, we do have pretty strict coding standards, so we do enforce those rigorously, through continuous integeration environment, and code reviews. Every piece of code that gets pushed to production has to be reviewed. And that’s literally 4 or 5 coders, sitting in a room, going line by line through change sets, and stuff like that. And that sounds really time consuming, but without question, on every code review I’ve sat in on, we’ve found one show stopper bug. So, those have been crucial, in getting things put together. The other things we did as we grew, is we broke the team up into smaller teams, so we have a development team of 20 – 25 developers, but that’s broken up into teams of between 3 and 5 developers. This really helps in a couple of areas. 1, it enforces code ownership. So everybody has this problem. I code this, then I go and work on something completely different. And 6 months later I come back to this code and I’ve forgotten. I don’t remember any of that. Where as if you’re always working in the same area of the sites, not only do you remember a lot more, you’re a lot more familiar with that. But also, you feel a bit more of a sense of ownership over that. You’re not just this hired gun that’s come in and ploughs through this feature then moves on to something else. You have your own territory that you need to keep track of. You need to keep really nice and what-not. So we did that, and then we have a bunch of core frameworks, that we’ve built. We have a small application framework, we have an AJAX framework, and now, we have this data access layer that we’ve been building up called IDDB. So I think those are pretty crucial too. It’s difficult to find coders that are intimately aware of memcached, and race conditions that exist in memcached, and um, we have to be very selective about what fields we add indexes on in mySQL. We also have to be very selective about how we store that. Normalization flies totally out the window, if you’re a DBA guy. A lot of concepts, they are not bad developers, by any means, they do great AJAX work, they do great application level PHP work, but if you don’t have frameworks in place for them to not have to worry about the super-super complex stuff. It’s going to be really difficult to hire, and it’s going to be really difficult to, you know, get a lot of stuff running in parallel and stuff.

Paul: Wow.

Joe: Yeah, and then we also, another one of the things we’ve adopted, is the agile SCRUM. So we’re doing sprints, and we’re running those in parallel now across all the teams. So right now we have 4 major projects going on right now.

Paul: Ok. So you talk about a sense of ownership there, and the developers are split down into multiple certain areas. You know, does that not get boring, for the developer, having to work on the same bit of code long time, or do you rotate people?

Joe: Well, we don’t currently rotate people, the team structure’s been in place for about 4 or 5 months now. And you know, most of the work they get is fairly immediate, and we’re moving major projects like Facebook connect, so the "Tools and integration team", their doing facebook connect now, and after this, they will maybe work on a new version of the API and so on. It’s written out to wide swaths of the site, so that we have "Site Apps" which does like, all the different applications on the site. And then we have "Tools and Integration" where we have the external projection of Digg, then we have "Core Apps" which is like, search, R&D stuff like recommendation engine, and what not, and then we have "Core Infrastructure".

Paul: So it’s probably enough to be interesting?

Joe: Yeah, we have pretty broad teams, and also, when we put people on those teams, even if someone has an amazing core infrastructure background, but they say, look, like, one of our UI guys, used to be really heavy into core infrastructure stuff when he worked at Quest, and managed massive warehouses, but he says, like, "That’s not what gets me up in the morning any more". It’s like, "Javascript UI interfaces are". So we try to put people on the teams where, you know, where their passions lie. And that’s kind of another thing that people need to recognize. And that’s like, not all developers are driven by, or interested in the same things. We have some, what I would call "UI / Frontend" developers, where like, they could care less about PHP, but we have PHP guys who could care less about Javascript. So I think, recognizing strengths and weaknesses, and capitalizing on those, is pretty important too.

Paul: OK, one last question to finish off, and that is, well you know, the kind of things that you’ve been talking about are fascinating to hear, about the kind of challenges that you have to face with the size of Digg, and the amount of traffic you have to handle. But obviously a lot of people who are listening to this podcast, aren’t at that stage. They are not working on massive projects like that. So I’m really interested in what advice you would have, for those who are just beginning to suffer from scalability problems, and they feel that it’s coming, and it’s something they need to be paying attention to. But it’s not on the enormous scale that you have to deal with. What things can they do right now to prevent problems down the line?

Joe: Um, I think, the easiest things you can do, is you need to re-think the LAMP acronym, because that stack is actually no longer really that stack. I would take Linux, and I’d take Apache out of that stack, and it doesn’t matter, as long as you’re running on a Unix. And as far as Apache goes, Lighty and EngineX are much better at getting a lot more money out of your box, as far as scalability goes. The two areas, that I think people, they sound hard, but they are really easy. One of them is installing and using Memcached, and the other one is installing and using a queuing system of some sort. And I think, like, recently I went through this with a little side project, called "Please Dress Me" which AJ and Gary Benashack and I did.

Paul: Oh, yes yes.

Joe: And we had a very small virtual server at MediaTemple, that survived pretty crushing blows from TechCrunch, Digg, BoingBoing, with almost no load. And that was like, beforehand, memcached is so second nature to me at this point, that I was just like, "Oh, well I’m just going to cache everything in memcached", and it was literally just like this RAM spewing machine. It didn’t actually hit the database. Actually my sysadmin at MediaTemple was like "Something’s really weard, MySQL is only doing like 1 query a second, and you’re doing like 500 requests per second from BoingBoing. So I’m cached. Yeah memcached is just like, it takes literally 10 minutes to install, and probably another hour or two to implement.

Paul: Wow, that sounds excellent, that’s really good advice. Joe, thank you so much for coming on the show, and I can’t wait to get you and Daniel fighting with one an other in the not too distant future. I’m hoping to get a good violent argument about designers and developers, just because I can.

Joe: Laughs.

Paul: I was a little bit disappointed when you guys sat down at Future of Web Design, were far too nice to one another, compared to the evening before, when you’d had a bit to drink, and you were talking in the restaurant. That’s the kind of conversation I want, that real vicious session.

Joe: OK, I’ll make sure that Daniel and I get liquored up before coming on then.

Paul: Yeah, that’s the answer. Ok, thank you so much Joe, that’s really good advice, and we’ll talk to you soon.

Joe: Thanks Paul, bye.

Thanks goes to Nathan O’Hanlon for transcribing this interview.

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Listeners feedback:

Top web designer applications

Often this section of the show consists of questions for myself and Marcus. However for a change, I thought we should ask the questions. Via the forum, the boagworld site and twitter I recently asked you to vote for your ‘favourite web designer application‘. The response was overwhelming and you can see the complete list of suggestions on UserVoice. However, here are the top 5…

  1. Firebug – Firebug is a Firefox addon that puts a wealth of development tools at your fingertips while you browse. You can edit, debug, and monitor CSS, HTML, and JavaScript live in any web page. A less popular suggestion was the Web Inspector in Safari.
  2. Web developer toolbar – The Web Developers toolbar is a Firefox addon that provides a variety of web development tools. You can disable CSS and Javascript, visually highlight elements, manage cookies and much more. A less popular alternative was the IE developers toolbar.
  3. Adobe Photoshop – A professional image-editing and graphics creation software from Adobe. It provides a large library of effects, filters and layers. This is the grandfather of such applications and many (like myself) use it out of habit more than anything else. Less popular suggestions included Fireworks, Illustrator and Inkscape.
  4. Coda – Coda is a one window development environment for the mac. It includes FTP, text editor, browser preview and even terminal window. A beautifully designed app it appeals to the more visual web designer. Simple, easy to use and elegant.
  5. TextMate – TextMate is a powerful text editor for the mac with an extensive plug-in architecture. From its code highlighting in near endless languages to support for numerous version control systems, TextMate is probably the most powerful text editor out there.

If you disagree with the Boagworld Listeners top five or want to see the other entries then head on over to UserVoice and vote for yourself.

Sending out bulk emails

My second listener contribution comes from the forum. It is a question from Richard about sending bulk email.

Richard writes: I need to send out bulk emails to approx 200k registered (opted in) users on a monthly basis.

Does anyone have any recommendations for an outsourced bulk email provider?

As with the previous contribution I want to focus on your responses rather than my own. This is what the Boagworld community had to say…

Jamie was the first of a number of people to recommend Campaign Monitor. Judging by the feedback from the forum they offer an excellent service but are expensive when compared to others.

As well as recommending Campaign Monitor Nick mentions Silverpop, which he described as ‘an enterprise affair’. Apparently it is not as polished as campaign monitor but considerably more powerful.

Phil recommended two more, Mail Chimp and Mad Mini. He hasn’t used them personally but the prices look good and he says the user interfaces appear polished.

Doug doesn’t recommend a specific service but does refer Richard to a post on Creative Tips which provides a comprehensive review of Campaign Monitor, MailChimp, AWeber, and Constant Contact.

If you have suggestions for Richard or would just like to share your experiences of using bulk email services then contribute to the thread in the boagworld forum.

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143. Partnership

Posted in Classic shows on by Paul Boag

On this week’s show Paul and Marcus discuss how to promote your web application, ways to improve the client/designer relationship and tools for managing your font library.

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News and events

Obama top technology promises

One of the most exciting things about being at this years FoWD conference in New York was that I got to witness the election of the next U.S. president.

Whatever your political persuasions it was a landmark election. Not only will Obama be the first African American president he is also probably the most technically aware.

Obama campaigned aggressively online, from a dedicated YouTube channel to Obama pages on Facebook and MySpace as well as Twitter feeds. He even had his own iPhone application.

So what can we expect from this tech-savvy President? How will he shape the future of U.S. online presence and possibly that of the entire web? An article on tgdaily entitled ‘Barack Obama’s Top technology promises‘ gives us a roundup of various technological promises from Obama’s speeches. These include:

  • A commitment to Net Neutrality
  • A desire to expand broadband penetration in the U.S.
  • A review of the current wireless spectrum usage
  • Tougher legislation around online security.

Of course, promises made on the campaign trail are one thing. We shall see what the reality turns out to be.

Could Microsoft consider adopting Webkit?

Talking of things that may never be, a young (and very brave) developer at Microsoft recently asked Steve Ballmer:

Why is IE still relevant and why is it worth spending money on rendering engines when there are open source ones available that can respond to changes in Web standards faster?

Ballmer’s response was surprising to say the least:

There will still be a lot of proprietary innovation in the browser itself so we may need to have a rendering service. Open source is interesting. Apple has embraced Webkit and we may look at that, but we will continue to build extensions for IE 8.

Although some have seen this as a sign that Microsoft may adopt Webkit, personally I am sceptical. Were Microsoft to completely change its rendering engine it would inevitably break large numbers of sites and cause outrage among many of their large corporate clients.

The backlash when moving from IE6 to IE7 was massive. Moving to Webkit would conflict with Microsoft’s mantra of ‘not breaking the web’.

That said, we can dream. Without a doubt the real innovation and competitive advantage among browsers is in features, not rendering engines. This would in many ways be a smart move allowing Microsoft to concentrate on differentiation through ‘extensions’ and functionality, rather than wasting time on getting pages to display correctly.

WCAG 2.0 resources

Something that is definitely going to happen very soon is the release of WCAG 2.0.

WCAG 2.0. has now become a proposed recommendation. This means it is not only technically complete but has been successfully implemented on a large variety of sites. In short, it has been proved to work.

According to the Web Standards group this means it could therefore be released before Christmas.

This is hugely significant and very exciting from an accessibility point of view. WCAG 2.0. has come a long way from its controversial beginnings and is now a very good set of guidelines.

Now is the time to start building compliant sites and the Web Standards Group has provided some useful resources for implementing WCAG 2.0.

Prototyping with XHTML

Our final story is a post on the Boxes and Arrows website encouraging us to ‘Prototyping with XHTML‘.

The article lays out an approach to wireframing and prototyping, which is based entirely around the use of XHTML. Starting with the XHTML itself, you build up the structure and elements within your site. You then add CSS and Javascript to further refine the concept.

It is an approach with a lot of merit. Unlike other methods, the prototype is not thrown away but becomes apart of the final deliverable. It is also an approach particularly suited to multiple iterations, allowing you to refine the design over time.

In a world of web applications it is becoming increasingly important to demonstrate user interactions in a way static comps cannot. However, although this approach is appealing I do not believe it replaces the Photoshop mockup. Client’s like to see ‘finished’ looking designs. That said, it is another useful tool in your arsenal and you should be sure to read this post.

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Feature: A Partnership of Cooperation

At this years FoWD I shared how the relationship between web design agency and client is fundamentally broken. Where there should be mutual respect and cooperation, there is negativity and mistrust. Read More.

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Listeners feedback:

Marketing a web application

Nick Charlton writes: Long time listener, haven’t asked a question before though..

Apart from your blog, the podcast and twitter, how else have you marketed GetSignOff?

To be honest, I have done very little marketing yet. However, I know that has got to change. The problem is that I am not a trained marketeer and so don’t really know what I am doing. That said I do have a rough plan:

  • Free pro accounts – While in beta we gave away numerous pro accounts to ‘web celebs’. However, to be honest it was a waste of time. These guys were either too busy to review it or just didn’t feel it was worth writing about. This time I intend to give free accounts to those who blog about the application. Not entirely sure how I am going to do this yet but I think it might generate some buzz.
  • Offering discounts – Discounts are an effective way of spreading word of mouth. Again I am not entirely sure if or when we will do this, but offering the occasional discount should encourage people to tell their friends.
  • Targeting appropriate publications – I am in the process of writing a number of articles either directly or indirectly related to GetSignOff. I have also asked some sites to review the application. I have approached sites like Digital Web, Think Vitamin and printed publications such as .net. Having a product aimed at people like myself makes identifying appropriate publications easy.
  • Producing supporting video content – I have already produced the ‘Getting design sign off‘ presentation but also intend to make some shorter tutorials for YouTube. These will contain valuable content in their own right, but will also promote GSO.
  • Utilising CSS galleries – Because my audience are web designers we have submitted GSO to several CSS galleries. We know that many web designers use these sites and so this gives our application a lot of exposure.
  • Use speaking opportunities – Speaking opportunities have been a great opportunity for promoting GSO and I have started tailoring my speaking slots around the subject of sign off.

In time we may consider advertising through things like Google Adwords or the Deck. However, until we are confident in the return on investment we are not willing to invest more money in anything other than development.

Font management

Aurel writes: I would realy like to know how designers deal with fonts? From personal experience, I have alot of fonts and it takes me time to find or manage them. So I was wondering if you know of any way to group the fonts, e.g. when you go through the drop menu of fonts in photoshop, they apear in groups (or something along those lines).

The solution I use was recommended on the Rissington Podcast (oh the shame of admitting that.)

It is a piece of software called FontExplorer X which is available for both the mac and PC. It has some superb features if you are serious about fonts. These include:

  • Organising your fonts – Organise using a library, folders, tags and even smart sets. You can directly access all typefaces from a certain foundry or all fonts tagged with a certain keyword? You can even view all italic fonts.
  • Auto activation – FontExplorer allows you to decide which fonts are available in which applications. This is ideal if you want to avoid scrolling through large numbers of fonts in applications like Photoshop.
  • Font information – FontExplorer gives you a clear customisable preview of your fonts as well as detailed information on the character set and usage restrictions.

The application also has an in built store that allows you to buy additional fonts within the same intuitive interface. I am guessing this is how they manage to offer the whole application absolutely free.

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142. Community

Posted in Classic shows on by Paul Boag

In this week’s show Ryan and Stanton cover the news in Paul’s absence, we’re joined by Mark Boulton to discuss design by community and Marcus reminds us to keep positive.

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News and events

Typeface.js

There are many solutions to insert custom fonts into your designs, whether it’s the good old CSS image replacement techniques, SiFR or FLiR, we’re really just biding our time until font-embedding through the @font-face rule becomes widely supported in the browsers (we’ve covered font-embedding before in show 129) But for now, there’s another technique on the block called typeface.js which uses browsers’ vector drawing capabilities to draw text in HTML documents.

Browsers have, for a while, supported vector drawing – Firefox, Safari and Opera support the canvas element was well as SVG, and IE supports VML. The Typeface.js project uses this vector capability to ‘draw’ the fonts within your webpage.

There are a couple of caveats, while the ‘drawn’ text is selectable, it’s not highlighted (though this should be remedied in future versions) and the fonts have to be converted first through a tool available on their website. But this might be a nice little fallback if the users browser doesn’t support @font-face.

Sell Your Web App

In our next news item Ryan Carson, owner of Carsonified, has this week published a blog entitled “Sell Your Web App: Lessons I Learned From Selling Dropsend” and as you would expect from that title he shares his tips and mistakes when selling his app and it’s a very interesting read.

He talks about considerations like choosing the right merchant account, anticipating high lawyer and accountancy fees and off course being discreet, don’t blog about your sale!

He’s also prompted for people to leave their own tips in the comments so if you’ve sold a web app yourself head over to thinkvitamin.com and share your experiences as well.

Lessons learned while building an iPhone site.

Theres a nice article on the Flickr Blog which details some of the lessons they learned while building the popular iPhone version of the Flickr site. They go into detail of subjects such as “don’t use a javaScript library or CSS framework”, “Load page fragments instead of full pages”, “optimize everything” and making sure to tell the user what’s happening through visual indicators.

If you’re developing iPhone apps, or are even just thinking about it I’d recommend giving this article a read before you start work, it may save you a lot of time down the line.

Free Site Validator

Our final news item brings our attention to a service blogged about by Roger Johansson at 456bereastreet.com. Roger was looking for a way to validate his site without having to do every page individually and what he found was freesitevalidator.com.

The service automatically craws each page of your site and checks it for validation, as well as giving you a report of any broken/dead links. Also known as Link Rot!

The service looks really useful so be sure to check it out.

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Interview: Mark Boulton on Design by Community

Paul: So as I said at the start of the show, joining me today is Mark Boulton. Good to have you on the show Mark.

Mark: Good to be here.

Paul: It’s nice to finally talk to you, we met up for the first time just a few days ago now.

Mark: Yeah, it was it was about a week ago.

Paul: It was great to do so. I talked about you a few weeks ago on the show as well when we were talking about a recent blog post that you wrote. But we will come on to that in just a minute. What we are going to talk about today with Mark is that he has done the unthinkable from a design point of view. Haven’t you really?

Mark: I have really yes.

Paul: You’re totally insane and so I wanted to pick you brain about why you have chosen to do the unthinkable. Before we get onto that, all of this resolves around some work your doing for Drupal. Tell us a little bit A) about what Drupal is and B) what you are doing.

Mark: Drupal is a Content Management Framework I guess, that allows people to build websites and its an open source project, it’s been going for quite a while now. I think seven years or so. The software is on version six now and it has a very large user base. Probably three hundred or so registered users.

Paul: Three hundred users?

Mark: Three hundred thousand!

Paul: Ah ok.

Mark: So it’s a pretty enormous project really, and with it being Open Source these are all very passionate developers. It’s quite a developer centric platform.

Paul: Ok.

Mark: The community, with it being open source the community contribute quite a lot to it, with modules and themes and that kind of thing, plugins. Our involvement in the project is redesigning drupal.org, which is kind of the home on the web of the framework, so you can go there and download and read documentation. But it’s also the home of the community, which is a pretty huge one. So it’s very exciting.

Paul: So tell us a little bit about the design process that you’re using, and this is what you blogged on and what kind of caught my attention and struck me as a ridiculous idea and what on earth were you thinking about?

Mark: Yeah, well I’ve been working with Lisa Raquelt who is a user experience researcher and kind of strategist. She started very early on in the process. She started blogging about it with the Drupal Association, who represent the Drupal community, who engaged us on the project. They are very happy with this being an open source project. They’re very happy with us to talk about it. Which is completely opposite to the way you normally work with a client.

Paul: Yeah, totally.

Mark: Normally you sign NDAs and it’s very closed doors. You don’t want to tell the competition, its the complete opposite, which is terrifying. Lisa started blogging about it and got really really great feedback from the community, really valuable feedback. Then I then started blogging about some of the design work we were doing. We are redesigning the wordmark and the branding currently. And I thought I may as well just jump in feet first here and see how this goes, which is totally contrary to the way I’ve been working in the past and the way your mind tells you you should work. You just shouldn’t openly talk about design because you’d think that it’s very subjective and everyone is going to have their own opinions, which is true. But we blogged about it a couple of weeks ago and it’s where my blog post on my own site, markboulton.co.uk, came about was I had a lot of people including yourself Paul. Who were saying I was insane, why are you doing this? And it’s this notion of design by community that’s very different to design by committee. Which is what a lot of people was telling me, "You can’t design by committee, it never works." Which is true, it never does.

Paul: So why do you think we are so hesitant as designers to talk openly? Is it fear of the subjective, is it that we don’t like people looking at our designs before they are finished? Why are we so hesitant do you think?

Mark: It’s a really interesting question that. I had an interesting conversation with an architect a couple of weeks ago about the exact same thing. A lot of architects don’t open up. A lot of designers, maybe product designers. An insight into the way somebody works and as designers we all work very differently and sometimes it’s a very private process. To expose that it’s almost like going out shopping with no clothes on. Suddenly you’re exposing the way that you work to everybody, to judge you, and people will judge you. It is a terrifying thought. I think part of it is also schooling. If you’ve done art at school, which most designers have done, most visual designers. You slave away on a piece of art and it’s not finished yet and it’s not finished and you don’t want anyone to look at it until it is finished, so I think there is an element of that as well. When I released two versions of the Drupal wordmark, for feedback they were very much just sketches. They were right in their first iteration. I would normally never do that but I thought let’s see what the community thinks.

Paul: So what happened when you released those two sketches?

Mark: It was carnage. Initially it was quite painful sometimes to listen to some of the comments to be honest. I think anybody takes their own work personally. If someone then attacks some of your own work with necessarily seeing any of the context and that kind of thing, then it can smart a little bit. But I’ve written my own blog for a while now and I’ve got reasonably thick skin, so it wasn’t that bad. What did come out through all of the comments were trends. Trends started to emerge. So from people’s subjective opinion, if enough people were having the same kind of subjective opinion, then that becomes less of an opinion and more of trend. And it was really those trends were looking to identify, that we could feed back into the development of the design.

Paul: It’s interesting there you talked about the fact the people who were seeing this stuff didn’t have the context. Did you not prepare the ground in any way? Did you not tell them why you took the approach you did? Or did you literally just put out the branding there and go, "What do you think?"

Mark: Yeah, there is a reasonably sticky situation with Drupal, particularly with the wordmark. They have a kind of logo at the moment, which is a kind of drop with a face on it. And that logo at the moment is under GPL so it can’t be trademarked which means the Drupal Association can not protect their own property, as it were, because this logo is under GPL. Which means that anybody can take it, change it, completely mess around with it. Which is fine, the community have been doing that for a long time now. So when I took on and blogged about this redesign of the wordmark, there was not the context, the business context, was perhaps lacking because I felt that I could not provide that business context. Because I was the designer and that should really come from someone else, and that was a little late in coming. Which is why the first blog post really didn’t go down too well, because I assumed the audience knew that this project was happening. As it turned out, it actually wasn’t. They didn’t know and it was all a bit of a mess, but it’s kind of smoothed over now, with later iterations and there’s been more blogging done by the Drupal Association. Which has provided the rationale for redesigning the branding.

Paul: Right, so there is a lesson to be learned there I guess of the importance of providing context and why stuff is happening and why you are taking the approach you are I guess.

Mark: Absolutely yeah, I think context is really important, especially for branding and logo design and that kind of thing. Just providing, and I was very aware of this when I blogged it. We all saw what happened with the London 2012 logo, when that is released very early without any context, it’s either misunderstood, or just hated or really liked. I’d rather have that kind of opinion anyway, than somebody kind of going, "Yeah, its alright."

Paul: You prefer to create a strong reaction.

Mark: Yeah, either positive or negative, because those are the reactions you can act upon. Anything in the middle is kind of gray, middle ground. That’s actually very very difficult to take on board and move forward with. So any kind of negative or positive reaction, you can take that on board, which we did. But the context for the Drupal logo is going to be the other stuff around it, which is the branding, the tone of voice, what is said on the page, the design, the other design elements around it, how it interacts with the existing kind of drop because they are still keeping that as a mascot. So it’s how all of that works together was perhaps lacking at this early stage. Which is why perhaps, going back to your initial question, designers don’t actually release very early on because the context isn’t there yet.

Paul: Yeah, which makes a lot of sense. When it came to the feedback, so you were obviously asking for feedback here, were you setting any kind of constraints on that feedback? From time to time I’ve talked on the subject about how to get design signoff and that kind of thing and one of the things that I always say is, "Don’t just say, ‘What do you think?’" but actually kind of try and guide the type of feedback you want and give a context to it, is that something you did?

Mark: Yeah. Not initially, which was why we had to.. The initial blog post didn’t really go down so well from an actionable sort of feedback point of view. Because I felt that a lot of the design questions I wanted answered. I think it was too early and I hold my hands up for that. I think it was too early in the process for me to blog about that. The second post that I put up I asked for specifics on whether or not the word mark needed a capital D or a lower case d and whether or not it needed, we were developing the idea of a secondary icon with it which is a splash and whether or not it needed the splash or not. We got some really great feedback because that focused people’s attention. That provided a really great selection of trends which have fed back into the next iteration. The first post was a bit of a free for all to be honest. Nothing really useful came out of it, which was a shame.

Paul: I mean you kind of, you talked about trends. Do you think that that is kind of, those trends that you see emerging, have the way that you have taken those on board has it been a kind of anecdotal trends or are you talking statistics here? Were you kind of marking down how many people you know said, "Yes, there should be an uppercase D." or whatever or are you just kind of taking on a feeling? Does that make sense?

Mark: Yeah. It was kind of taking on the feeling. More qualitative than quantitative at this point. However, for the cap D or lowercase d we could have just run a poll which in hindsight we should have done, is just had a tick box for each question as it were. However I’m always a little, I actually quite like a lot of the qualitative feedback because people were saying, "Yes cap D and splash," but then they go on to say something else. If we just reigned it into a simple poll then we would have lost all that really great, valuable feedback, because it’s that that provides context for their answer.

Paul: Yeah, I mean you won’t necessarily know why they’re saying a capital D.

Mark: Exactly, and there was enough of people saying the same kind of thing in those comments for it to be a pretty good trend for us to act upon. And it also throws out more heads about them on as it were. There was a lot of valuable comment from the Drupal community especially. And that we would have spent six months trying to research the ins and outs of that community, the history and the culture because there is an awful lot, you know. It’s been going seven years and there’s a lot of people in there. I would have been around ‘til next year trying to fully understand that community if I hadn’t adopted this open way of working.

Paul: It’s quite interesting, isn’t it? I mean when they were coming back and you were seeing a trend emerging very definitely one way or the other over something, were you always going with that decision or were sometimes you saying "Well actually, although everybody’s saying we should go with a capital D or whatever, I’m not going to because of X, Y and Z."

Mark: Yes. I think there does have to be somebody who is willing to make a decision on something that needs to be decided upon. If fifty percent of people said, "I like a black website," and fifty percent of people say, "I like a white website," the compromise is that you end up with a gray website and nobody wants gray. So, what we’ve done especially with the cap D and lowercase d for example there was pretty much an overwhelming response to, "Yes it should be lowercase d," because it’s kind of more attractive aesthetically and all the rest of it. However we’ve chosen to go with uppercase D and that is because of business requirements and also because of the ties in with the documentation. We’ve revised the word mark now where the uppercase D is actually a lot better than the previous version. Perhaps when I posted initially the lowercase d and the uppercase D were not really on an equal footing design-wise. The uppercase D needed a lot of refinement and again perhaps that skewed the results, skewed the comments and so we’ve actually reversed the general trend there and said, "Actually no. We think we should go with the uppercase D for this reason and this reason," and that will continue throughout the whole process. We’ve got to remember, and it’s very important, that the Drupal Association hired us for our expertise and if we feel strongly about something then hopefully we’ll go ahead with that and we’ll push back on any feedback.

Paul: I mean it’s quite interesting. You talk about, "as we go through this process." So it sounds like you’re gonna keep going down this line, that you’re gonna, you know, as you create say, the website interface that you’ll expose that.

Mark: Yeah we are. If you have a look on groups.google.org and do a search for the redesign group in there we have set in a bunch of dates in the calendar for gathering community feedback. So we will be posting up a link on Thursday to the prototype we’re developing and we’ll be doing that for the next six to eight weeks. Every other week we’ll be posting a link up there to gather feedback throughout the weekend. So we’ll be posting it up on Thursday/Friday morning and then we’ll be kind of locking off comments on Monday and then all of those comments will hopefully try and establish some trends and feedback. That’ll then feed back into the next iteration. So we’ve pretty much set a precedent here and we’re gonna be designing in the open ‘til the final curtain call, as it were.

Paul: Excellent! So how do you feel this differs from design by committee? Because from chatting to you when we met up whenever it was I got the distinct impression from you, you saw this as a very different kind of experience, but why, what makes it different?

Mark: Yeah, well I’ve been involved in design by committee quite a few times. I’m sure a lot of designers have and generally in those instances you’re in a boardroom or a meeting and there are several people, maybe twelve tops, and they all have very strong opinions. Generally, as I said in my blog post, there might be an alpha male in there or two sometimes. People can rally around the loudest voice, so all of a sudden that becomes the opinion. It can be a very, very difficult environment to work in because there are so few people, all with a very loud voice. Design by community is a different kettle of fish really because we’re designing for essentially 300,000 clients and the wider web community as well, we’re not just asking the Drupal community for feedback here, we’re also asking the wider web community for feedback. Anybody can get involved in this, it’s not just for the Drupal community. So anybody can. So if you feel like, talking to the listeners here, if anyone feels like weighting in with their comments, please do. Because it’s very important to us that the wider audience is reflected in this redesign and not just designing for the Drupal community. So it’s a very different process I think, because we’re kind of staffing back a little bit. We’re not in a meeting room with twelve people trying to come up with a solution. We’re putting stuff out there. We’re asking for comments from a lot of people who are thankfully providing comments, which is great. Really thoughtful feedback, then we can try and establish trends and then it’s those trends that we act upon. It becomes a little less subjective. That’s the idea anyway.

Paul: It’s the scale that turns it into trends rather than just an opinionated person I guess.

Mark: Yeah, that’s right. And you do have to, like I said initially, sometimes it’s difficult to read a bit of a flaming going on on your blog posts, you know, because there are quite a few people out there who will be very passionate about this project. They’re very passionate about Drupal because they’ve got a lot of time and money, a lot of people their livelihood is dependent upon this platform. So we have to really take that into account that this is serious for a lot of people. We’re not just redesigning a website here, we’re actually providing a platform for a community to do their work. So it’s pretty important stuff.

Paul: So, I mean do you think that this is a kind of a peculiar situation? You know, is the Drupal project unusual or would this be a kind of approach you would encourage for other designers working on other types of projects?

Mark: It’s a really interesting question. I mean I’ve worked waterfall methodologies in the past so you get your, you do your research, you do your initial designs, they get signed off and then you build your website, it’s very linear. And after working at the BBC for so long I realized that, because we worked very iteratively at the BBC that actually a more iterative approach was actually more valuable so to take that client-side approach, and the agile software development approach, to take that commercially with design is actually very difficult. But with the clients we are currently working with, that’s the way that we work. So we don’t work in a waterfall methodology, we work very iteratively upon fixed time scales. So we have a week per iteration for example. Now the feedback thing, the only difference really between Drupal and any other big project is the fact it’s open source and has a very, very big active community who are used to working in this way. I think that’s the critical thing is that they’re used to people putting software updates out early, feedback and they get changed and honed down until the final version is released but it’s just the way that they’re working so we have to kind of slot into that culture and it’s not a culture that design thrives in actually.

Paul: No, I can imagine.

Mark: No it’s a very difficult environment for design because, and it goes back again to one of your initial questions about wanting to sit there and craft a solution until it’s finished. Well that goes counter to the way that this open source culture works. They want to see stuff early. They want to feed back. They want their say. So as long as you kind of understand that and they’re not being grouchy or attacking you in any way they just want the very best for the project. So yeah, it’s worthwhile considering it as a working approach. Certainly the iterative approach is worthwhile considering for any project but the getting feedback early, if your audience is big enough then give it a go and see how it works. You know if you speak to me in six weeks time I may have a completely different conversation. This is really very much a work in progress and we’re just seeing how it’s going. It’s not been done as openly in the public before. I can’t really remember any projects from a design perspective that have been like this. It’s fairly unique. Which is really great, it’s exciting. So we’ll just see. We’ll see what happens.

Paul: Yeah, very interesting stuff Mark. Thank you very much for coming on the show.

Mark: Thank you for having me. It’s been a pleasure.

Paul: And we will wait with baited breath to see future blog posts as to how the experience goes to the bitter end.

Mark: Please do because I’ll be blogging about it pretty much constantly throughout the life of the project.

Paul: We’ll keep an eye on that. Thank you very much for your time and we’ll get you back on soon enough.

Mark: Great! Thanks Paul!

Paul: Bye bye.

Mark: Cheers. Bye.

Thanks goes to Todd Dietrich and Andy Kinsey for transcribing this interview.

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Listeners feedback:

Keeping Positive

Got this question from Bill (remember him?!)….

I have just found out that the potential new project I have put loads of work in to winning is not coming my way. I wrote an extensive proposal, did some unpaid mock-up work, attended a presentation and jumped through every hoop thrown my way.

I was told by the client that it was ‘very close’ but on this occasion I had not been successful. Gutted.

How do you guys at Headscape cope with these types of rejections?

To be honest, and this is from a lot of bitter experience, it’s hard and some are harder to take than others.

I do, however, have a few thoughts and pointers that may help. Firstly, you can help yourself by weeding out the enquiries that you will never win.

Are these people worth your time?

Check out the email address of the enquirer. If it’s gmail, hotmail, yahoo or similar then chances are your potential client is just looking for free consultancy from you. I.e. they have an idea and have no idea what’s entailed in making that idea happen. And they certainly will not pay you to research it.

Secondly, and I am only aware of this possibility in the UK, but you can check up on a company through the Companies House website. This tells you all sorts of useful information about how long they’ve been around, their liquidity etc. You may change your mind about responding to a tender sent from a dissolved company.

Talk money

There is nothing more frustrating than being told that you are ‘way out of the ballpark’ after putting hours, even days, of effort into a proposal.

Ask people, up front, what their budget is. Explain that you need to know it to respond with the most appropriate solution for them. An example I often use is usability testing. Everyone knows that testing, preferably many times throughout a project can only be a good thing. But that said, not doing any testing doesn’t automatically mean that your client will get an unusable turkey for a site.

If you don’t get anywhere by asking then create a 2 or 3 paragraph solution with associated tasks (a mini proposal I guess) and email that to the potential client with an associated ballpark price. If they still want you to deliver a ‘full’ proposal then, chances are, your ballpark is within their range.

Ask/listen

Ok, so assuming you think that responding to the proposal is a good use of your time, you now need to read their brief in detail noting questions you have along the way. You will make a number of assumptions about what is the correct solution for this client while you are reading.

You need to talk to the client to confirm their answers to your questions but you also need to listen to their responses to ensure that your assumptions are correct. It’s very easy to arrogantly assume that ‘you know best’ because you’ve been doing it for years.

This also applies to your written proposal. Don’t describe and price up what you think the client needs – go through every point in their brief and respond to it accordingly. If it is plain obvious that something they’re asking for makes no sense at all, then tackle it head on and explain why they shouldn’t be doing it.

Stick to your guns

We decided, quite a while back, and for very good reason, that we would not do any unpaid mock-up design work. In some cases this has been seen as a positive thing (once it has been explained) but with other potential projects I’m sure it has adversely affected our chances of winning the work. However, we should stick to what we believe is right. Chopping and changing presents a negative image to both potential clients and our staff.

If you do decide to present initial mock-up ideas don’t be tempted into iterating them further. Any client who asks for is again asking for free work and is most definitely to be avoided.

Be gracious

Sometimes you just have to accept that you’re not the right fit with certain companies – even if the initial phone call or meeting went really well. It may well be that someone else delivers just the thing that really swings it for the client – sometime you just don’t know what that is.

If you do lose then you need to accept that you win some, you lose some. It often happens that these things happen in streaks which can be very frustrating. We found ourselves turning away superb opportunities earlier this year simply because we were too busy.

But always try to bring a positive attitude to any rejection because it is possible that these people will contact you again for further work (though beware that you are simply making up numbers!) or they may recommend you to others. They won’t do either if you react badly to the rejection!

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140. Launch

Posted in Classic shows on by Paul Boag

In this week’s show GetSignOff has finally launched, we talk about how to use web stats to improve your site and we answer your questions about roles with web design and should you help clients with hosting.

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News and events

Acid3 receptions and misconceptions and do we have a winner?

The team that develop WebKit, the open source web browser engine that Safari and the new Google Chrome are built on, have just announced that the engine passes the Acid3 test developed by The Web Standard Project (Wasp).

So what is Acid3?

Acid3 runs a series of tests against a given browser and produces a score, the goal being 100/100. This score is generated from how "standards compliant" the browser is. For example whether it supports CSS2.1 styles such as "inline-block" and "pre-wrap", if it supports SVG-Fonts, what DOM features is supports and a whole range of other criteria.

So WebKit passes!

Does this mean we should ditch Firefox, IE and all the other browsers in favour of Safari or Chrome, well no, and that’s what Lars Gunther is talking about in his article over at WaSP.

It’s great that tests like Acid3 exist and that browser developers endeavour to build better browsers because of them. All in all it results in a much better experience for the average user and makes our lives as Web Designers much more hassle free.

6 Things To Like About Dreamweaver CS4

So Dreamweaver CS4 became available this week, 15th October to be exact and Alex Walker over at Site Point has been having a play and has shared with us 6 thinks he likes about the new release. Check out his article for details of each, but a summarised list is:

  • UI/Workflow Improvements
  • The Related Files Toolbar
  • Code Navigator
  • Live View
  • Advanced JavaScript Interpretation
  • Making JavaScript Unobtrusive

From reading the article these improvements over the previous version look really promising. One feature that really caught my eye is "intelligent code completion" for JavaScript and the most popular libraries such as jQuery, MooTools, Prototype etc, the same way it does for HTML!

It would also appear that Adobe are making big improvements to the "Display View" of Dreamweaver, which has historically been the stigma plaguing most "professional" designers who use it. The "Display View" now has integrated code navigation, so you can use it to jump to specific elements within the page and Adobe have also built WebKit into Dreamweavers core so you can run your site through the software to test JavaScript, rendered CSS, server-side code etc.

So will these new features encourage more people to use Dreamweaver?

7 Ingredients of Good Corporate Design

Smashing Magazine has published a great article that discusses 7 ingredients to good corporate design. They break the discussion into two elements:

  • Design as artistic representation, which consists of:
    • Logo
    • Typography
    • Colours
  • Design strategy, consisting of:
    • Brand
    • Quality
    • Community
    • Culture

It’s important to understand that corporate design isn’t simply of a graphical nature but is intrinsically linked with your strategy, the goals that you set and how you implement them and this article is well worth the read.

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Launch: GetSignOff Goes Public

Monday GetSignOff finally opened to the public. It has been an interesting journey read more here.

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Feature: Using Web Stats for More

We all use web stat tools like Google Analytics for tracking marketing campaigns. However, they can also be used to improve your site. We discuss this in this weeks feature.

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Listeners feedback:

Salesman seeks designer/developer

Got this audio question from Andrew:

Hi Paul, hello Marcus and hi to all the people who work at the show. I live in Canada so hearing your nice English voices through my headphones is great. My name is Steve and I’ve done some freelance web design for clients in the past, but the part I enjoyed the most was the selling cycle; being able to explain to the client what a standards based website could do for them and then persuade them that investing in such a site would be wise for their business. I bet there’s a lot of designers and developers out there who are absolute Jedis when it comes to coding CSS and HTML but really hate the selling part. And then there are people like me who can really sell well but I wish I could work with people who are amazing at building websites.

My two-pronged question is as follows:

Is there a website or another resource that would allow people like me, who love web design, but are more business/marketing oriented to touch base with people who are in the opposite situation? And I’m thinking more than just a job board here, I guess the best analogy would be something that Marcus might be familiar with – adverts in the back of music magazines that would say something like ‘band seeks drummer’ or ‘talented singer needs people to play instruments’.

My other question: how did you guys do it at Headscape, were you all great at coding and someone had to get pushed out the door and start selling or were there very separate roles from the beginning?

Ok, part one first (I’m original aren’t I)… the ‘band seeks drummer’ analogy is good but I much prefer a dating agency analogy! Cuddly, financially sound salesman WGSOH seeks quiet, intense, practical developer for fulfilling relationship. :-)

As far as I am aware, sadly, this service does not exist. Forums, like the Boagworld forum, have got to be your best bet.

Right, part two. Much as I would love to claim that I used to be great at coding before they kicked me out of the door to do the selling, it would be a blatant lie. When Headscape started, the three of us came from different disciplines – Paul was designer/tech (it’s true!), Chris was project manager and I was salesman. We soon didn’t have enough design/tech resource and started to recruit but the fact that a) Chris was organising and pushing projects along and b) that I was concentrating on bringing in new work meant that we were running things like a larger agency (more efficiently and with less risk) very early on.

I have banged on about how important effective selling is in the past many times so won’t repeat myself here. The only thing I will say is that having totally separate roles is not necessarily a good thing. Even now, we don’t have very separate roles. Chris and Paul are both heavily involved in the sales process and always have been. In my view, it is the responsibility of the company directors to se
ll.

But, added to that, Chris and I also do a lot of consultancy work (requirements analysis, IA work etc), and Paul still does design work. This is important because it keeps our ‘hand’ in. Getting too involved in one role can often lead to a lot of potentially out-of-date talking, and very little ‘doing’.

Do/should you help clients’ with hosting?

Hi all

I’m just about to do a ‘simple’ website for a friend (aka my 1st client) which will try to market something he is looking to rent out. Whilst I’m confident I can do the website, I’m not sure how far I should go with helping/organising his hosting. The client doesn’t know anything about hosting and doesn’t have any hosting space with his broadband provider.

Now I don’t really want to get into organising hosting unless I have to, so I’d just like to know what the ‘norm’ is in this regard? As a web developer/firm do you automatically sort out hosting, do you get the client to do it and then give you the hosting password so you can upload the site? Is it even a good/lucrative idea to get involved in sorting this out as part of the ‘service’? Can people suggest what they do please?

Thanks, Alex

This question came from the Forum and there are already some interesting posts in response. The biggest issue here is:

Can you support this website?

Can you provide support if the site goes down in the middle of the night, on Christmas Day, or even when you’re on your two week break to Spain?

If you decide to sell hosting then you become a middle man between your client and the hosting company. Your client is contracted to you to provide and support hosting, not the hosting company. Of course, you have a relationship with the hosting company where they will provide an agreed level of support but… you are still the person that has to deal with your clients’ issues as and when they arise.

At Headscape we are completely open about this with our clients. We tell them that we only provide support (of any kind) on working days between 9am and 5.30pm. We’re not set up to do anything more than that.

However, we do offer hosting for those clients that feel that the level of support that we offer is enough. We have our own managed platform and we also act as a reseller for a large hosting company.

The solution for those clients that require a superior level of service is simple. The client buys the hosting directly thereby taking you – the agency/freelancer – out of the loop. We specify technologies, discuss the level of support required, amount of bandwidth etc with client – we will also set up the site on the web server – but the client orders and pays for the hosting.

This has worked really well particularly for the larger, busier sites that we have developed.

All that said, if you act as a reseller, and you have enough clients, you can make a decent profit via hosting. However, don’t be fooled into thinking that it doesn’t involve any work keeping all those clients happy and up to date. If you have enough clients to make money out of hosting then it’s very likely that you will have regular hosting issues to deal with and constant renewals to deal with.

My friend and colleague, the long suffering Mr Scott, has many times said that he wished we had never touched hosting simply because it often ends being a constant irritation that gets in the way of project work and rarely pays for itself.

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136. Stagnation

Posted in Classic shows on by Paul Boag

In this week’s show we talk about overcoming stagnation and Ed Merritt shares a technique to achieve fixed footers without the use of javaScript.

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News and events

Design by committee vs design by community

We all know that design by committee sucks, but why? What is it that makes the process fail and what would happen if you took it to the extreme, and opened up the design process to an entire community?

That is exactly what Mark Boulton has done with the redesign of the Drupal website. With over 200,000 registered users this is a significant community and not the kind of environment where you would feel inclined to design in the open.

However, according to Mark it has generally been a success.

The key would appear to be scale. In design by committee you typically have a handful of decision makers, and one or two dominant individuals who overwhelm the others. It is an environment of conflict and compromise.

However when designing by community, the sheer scale of the community drowns out anybody who seek to dominate the process. You move from an environment of personal opinion to one where you are monitoring emerging trends.

So next time you have a client wanting to design by committee, consider opening up the process rather than locking it down to one or two decision makers.

Self Directed Projects

When was the last time you worked on a personal or internal project? Do you do anything that is not paid client work? If not, then according to IdeasOnIdeas you should start.

This post interviews several designers about their their non-client work. It becomes obvious as you read that self directed projects offer real tangible benefits. These include…

  • R&D – The chance to experiment with emerging technologies and techniques, that otherwise you would not get to try out.
  • Build visibility – Higher exposure online as people are attracted to your work.
  • Prove capability – Demonstrating your ability to deliver solutions not in your portfolio of client work.
  • Increase skills – Allowing you to improve your skills in areas where they are weak or have not been maintained.
  • Team building – Building a sense of common purpose among your team in a way that is more engaging than client work.
  • Creates passion – Allowing you to work on a project that generates excitement rather than ones that simply pays the bills.
  • As a release mechanism – The chance to play, and let off steam after the limitations of client work.

    • After years of spending all my time on client work, I have now reached a point where most of what I do is self directed and I can honestly say it is a joy. I also think it has been hugely beneficial for Headscape.

    Understanding Disabilities when Designing a Website

    Back when I was a teenager the government launched a massive campaign warning of the dangers of unprotected sex and in particular the risk of contracting HIV. It was a very powerful campaign and led to a generation growing up much more aware of the risks. However this campaign wasn’t followed up for the next generation and the rates of sexually transmitted diseases increased.

    Why do I bring this strange analogy up? Because I believe we are in danger of doing that with web accessibility. Many of us are getting bored of talking about accessibility. It feels like we are covering the same old ground. Why do we need another article about accessibility basics? We have heard it all before, right?

    Well maybe some of us have, but there is a new generation of web designers who have not. They need to know what we take for granted. Also, it wouldn’t hurt us to be reminded every once in a while.

    That is why I was so pleased to see Digital Web publishing an introduction to accessibility this week. Sure we have heard it all before and you might be tempted not to bother looking it up. However, I would encourage you to take the time. I guarantee it will give you at least one piece of advice which you fail to implement currently.

    More ways to find inspiration

    I often talk about how we need to look for inspiration beyond the web. In fact in this weeks Smashing Magazine, they post some incredibly inspiring graffiti that is worth a look. But, can we be inspired by other websites or does that always end in plagiarism?

    It’s a dangerous game when you start turning to gallery sites for inspiration. Before you know it you can find yourself lifting far too much of the design.

    How then can you be inspired without ripping off somebody else’s website? One way is to look at the design and ask yourself which specific elements you like. Is it the navigation, their styling of bullet lists or the way they handle the footer. By looking at individual elements rather than the whole you remove the temptation to copy the entire thing.

    This is what a designer from Portugal has done. He has made screen grabs of websites and placed them in his flickr account. However, rather than grabbing the entire site, in most cases he captures only a fraction of the page. He removes the temptation to steal a whole design and yet provides himself with inspiration next time he needs to design a comment form or build an online calendar.

    Take a look at his inspirational flickr feed and hopefully it will encourage you to take a similar approach.

    Back to top

    Feature: Overcoming Stagnation

    For many websites the days of rapid growth have passed and they have slipped into stagnation. How then can you re-energise a site and start it growing again? We look at this in this weeks feature.

    Back to top

    Listeners feedback:

    Fixed Footer without javaScript

    Ed Merritt (one of our very awfully clever designers at Headscape) has come up with a innovative little CSS technique I have encouraged him to share with you.

    Ed begins…

    A client recently asked me if it was possible to have a page footer which would stick to the bottom of the browser window if the content didn’t fill the window, but behave normally (i.e. be pushed down by the content) when the content was tall enough. Read more here.

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    135. Libraries

    Posted in Classic shows on by Paul Boag

    In this week’s show we talk with John Resig on javaScript libraries and address the question what is more important when we release an app: speed or quality?

    Play

    Podcast: Download (27.5MB)

    Download this show.

    Launch our podcast player

    News and events

    The complexity tax

    Don’t you hate it when somebody beats you to the punch? I recently finished writing a report for our biggest client (Wiltshire Farm Foods). It talks a lot about the need to simplify and remove complexity. It is a lesson we should all learn and so I am in the process of turning extracts from the report into a blog post which we will cover in next weeks show.

    However, it would appear I have been too slow and that Gerry McGovern has beaten me to it with an excellent post on the cost of complexity. However, where I focus on why simplicity is important, he addresses the underlying causes of complexity.

    For me his post is summed up in the following quote…

    Most organizations are producing far too much content. Too many emails, too many PowerPoints, too many reports, too many webpages. All this content creation activity keeps a lot of people busy.

    If you are part of a large organisation or work on a substantial website you need to read this post.

    10 Rules for Driving Traffic Using Forums

    What do you do if you have no marketing budget but have some free time to promote your site? Well, there are a number of guerilla marketing techniques you could use but contributing to forums is one of the most effective.

    Sitepoint has posted an article explaining why forums are a great way of driving traffic to your site. It goes on to suggest 10 rules for doing so effectively. These include…

    • Build your profile
    • Follow the rules
    • Start by responding
    • Contribute your expertise
    • Don’t be a ‘me too’ poster
    • Don’t self promote
    • Explain yourself, but be brief
    • If you’re wrong, say so
    • Write intelligently and correctly
    • Negativity is a no-no

    This is an excellent article and one that you should definitely read before using forums as a marketing tool. If you do not, you are in danger of damaging your brand, rather than driving traffic.

    Accessibility in suit and tie

    The life of the corporate web worker who cares about standards and accessibility can be a frustrating one; hampered by office politics and archaic content management systems. In an article on the Think Vitamin site, Bruce Lawson looks at what you can do to make sure your projects are as accessible for your users as possible.

    Its a very pragmatic article, which I love. Bruce works from the premise that this is going to be tough and makes suggestions like "some accessibility is better than none". He also talks about the need for ‘buy-in from the top’ but goes on to provide practical tips about how to get that buy in. What is more, his arguments for accessibility were backed up with facts. For example…

    Finally, he looks at how to get content providers onboard through education and getting them writing HTML rather than relying on the WYSIWYG editor.

    UK Government Browser Guidelines

    Our final story raises an interesting discussion; should you decide which browsers to support based on popularity or capability?

    Apparently, the UK government believes we should test on the basis of popularity. In a draft document advising public sector websites, it suggests that if a browser appears in visitor logs as being below an arbitrary percentage of total “unique visitors”, then it should not be listed as being “fully supported”.

    On the surface this appears very sensible. However, as Jon Hicks points out on his site, this can create problems. He writes…

    It isn’t clear how the supported browser list would be enforced, but I’m concerned that this approach will encourage browser sniffing, a move that will exclude browsers like Omniweb, Shiira and iCab, simply because their name isn’t ‘Safari’. They share the exact same rendering engine, and therefore require no further testing. You can be more inclusive without spending any extra resources.

    In other words we should be defining our list of supported browsers based on capability rather than popularity. This is the approach used by Yahoo! and it is one that I would fully support.

    The Yahoo model supports all browsers through progressive enhancement and graceful degradation, without the need to test on every browser. Its a neat solution but one that the UK government guidelines specifically say they do not advocate…

    These guidelines do not advocate specific development methodologies, for example graceful degradation or progressive enhancement. However, it is widely accepted that sites conforming to open web standards such as XHTML and CSS are more likely to work well across a wide range of browsers.

    How come if they are widely accepted, do they not advocate them?

    Fortunately there is an opportunity to change things before this is set in stone. I recommend reading the WaSP article on the recommendations and then sending some polite feedback to the powers that be.

    Back to top

    Interview: John Resig on javaScript Libraries

    Paul:Joining me today is John Resig, who is famous for jQuery and the work that he has been doing with jQuery. John, it is great to have you on the show.

    John:Well, thanks for having me.

    Paul:I have to say this at the beginning. I have to get this out of the way. I absolutely love working with jQuery, and it’s an absolute pleasure. I remember twittering just a few days ago that every time I start doing anything in jQuery it makes me smile, so that’s got to be a good sign.

    John:Well that’s good. I’m glad to hear it.

    Paul: What I wanted to do today is get you on the show and not just for me to suck up and say how great jQuery is, but to kind of look a little bit broader at the subject of JavaScript libraries. Because I have to say from a personal point of view my opinion has changed quite a lot about JavaScript libraries and I’m kind of interested in your perspective on things as somebody that’s actually created one. I think the place I want to start is for a long time I had the attitude that you shouldn’t use JavaScript or indeed any library and that you should know the underlying code yourself and all of this kind of thing. Let’s start with the question of how do you know if it’s appropriate to use a JavaScript library? When is it appropriate to use it? What’s your opinion on that?

    John:Well, I guess my opinion is it’s always appropriate, and I mean the simple fact of the matter is that there’s two things. One is that when you’re developing, you’re trying to support, generally a large number of browsers simultaneously. This is the same as if you are doing CSS development, JavaScript development, you want to support a large enough market share and you want to make that development process easy. The problem is twofold that you’re going to be encountering weird browser bugs and the APIs, the different utilities the browsers provide, will be different. For example, Internet Explorer provides different ways of handling events from all the other browsers. So what libraries do is that they remove you away from dealing with browser bugs, which is huge. And at the same time they provide a simple interface that you can interact with that will just work ubiquitously.

    Paul:Is there a problem there in the sense of, you know, somebody came along and they basically learned to write jQuery for example from scratch, but never learned the kind of underlying JavaScript? Is there a problem there, do people need to know JavaScript before they start using a library?

    John:It depends on the library, but I don’t think you do. I don’t think you have to know JavaScript. In a lot of ways, at least in my experience with jQuery directly there’s a lot of people who have used jQuery who have never done any programming whatsoever. jQuery does embody a lot of advanced concepts but you don’t necessarily have to know them in order to make good use of jQuery. I know this sort of translates well into some of the other libraries but one point of concern you brought up was what if someone learns a library but doesn’t learn JavaScript? I used to be more concerned about that, if someone only knew a library and I guess from a purist perspective, that’s a bad thing. Fundamentally, you want people to be getting better at programming JavaScript, not this specific thing. However, I think the reality of it is, is that so many people are just using JavaScript or CSS or doing web design, they just want to get their job done. It’s not really a matter for them of becoming an excellent JavaScript programmer or awesome CSS user, you want to get from A to Z and finish their work in an effective manner that works everywhere. So I think it’s important to realize that this market, so to speak, exists. It’s a very large one. And that ignoring it completely will just leave users frustrated and going back to the simple cut and copy paste scripts that they used to use. So, I think what libraries are doing is they are instilling good standards, they are instilling good practices, even though the users don’t necessarily know about it. And then eventually what’s good is that since these libraries have these good practices that users can always open up a library and read about it and try to understand better what’s going on.

    Paul:I guess that’s always been a little bit of my concern with relying heavily on a library is that if you come across something that’s a problem or a bug or something like that, you can’t fix it yourself because you don’t necessarily know your way around the library. What’s your response to people that say stuff like that?

    John:Well by the same token if you encounter a problem with a browser you are far less capable of fixing that issue. There’s really no way about it other than that ultimately it would be good to have that knowledge, absolutely. I fully support people who want to do that and I’m writing a second book now encouraging people to do that, to dig into libraries, to learn more, to build their own. What’s important here is that you just don’t, you can’t force people to do it if they, one if they don’t want to or if they’re just not capable. There’s no reason I feel to force a designer, someone who’s a designer by trade to learn the fundamentals of object oriented programming, or functional programming. Theoretically that can help them some way in the future but what’s more important to them is doing good design and I think by helping people keep their focus where it should be. Obviously if a library is able to help programmers program better, that’s good as well. It’s all about helping people keeping their focus and making sure they aren’t down a rabbit hole getting sidetracked.

    Paul:I think that’s the thing that really attracted me to jQuery is as a front-end interface designer was the fact that I could pick it up and run with it very easily. The conclusion I came to is, “OK. Well if I do by some chance find a major problem with it, there’s a massive community of very clever people out there that I can ask and I can get help from.” So, that kind of reassured me, I think. If then, we’ve kind of come to terms with the fact: “OK we want to use a library.” There are so many different ones out there. Run us through some of the different options available and the pros and cons and how do you go about picking which library is right for you?

    John:Well it really depends a lot. There’s a coupe questions you need to answer. Probably the most important of which is you need to ask yourself, how do you want to write JavaScript? Because libraries end up augmenting or really changing the style of how you write JavaScript. So, finding a library that you like how it looks. It sounds very superficial, but you like how it looks, you like how the code feels is a great place to start. There’s obviously a lot of libraries to choose from. There’s a select group of libraries whose quality is generally above the others and the popularity of those libraries generally reflects the quality as well. Out of those I pick generally jQuery, Prototype, Yahoo UI, dojo, then also MooTools and sometimes XJS. What’s interesting is all those libraries are open source and they are all the most popular JavaScript libraries. I don’t think that’s a coincidence. It’s just a matter of fact that in the web these open source frameworks are going to improve better and attract more users and generally have better community to surround them. So out of these libraries though you break down into a lot of different paradigms for development. I’ll try to summarize as best I can, but it really is not substitute for trying it out yourself. Looking and seeing some examples you can have a pretty good feel right away. So, Prototype and MooTools, they both extend the native objects of the language. They both try to improve the JavaScript language itself. So they add new methods to arrays, they make strings better, at the same time they provide things like object-oriented code
    , and all the way out to doing things like events and AJAX. The normal things that you would expect. But at a very broad level they are trying to improve the overall quality of the language and of the experience. Then you have Dojo, Yahoo UI, and XJS and they are generally very modular, very package oriented and they have components you can easily snap in and out with nice ways of handling dependencies and it can end up being a very cleanly architected style of coding. They really support object-oriented code, and additionally events, AJAX, all the normal stuff you would expect. I would tend to group jQuery a little bit differently in that jQuery is more oriented toward improving the relationship between JavaScript and HTML and that it’s highly focused on searching through an HTML document, modifying some things, just getting in and getting out. Unobtrusive, and it doesn’t provide any language features, it doesn’t provide any object-oriented code writing features, it’s just hyper-focused at the task on hand.

    Paul:It strikes me from my experience with jQuery that it’s very much a tool that’s primarily focused at helping front-end interface people implement the kind of functionality that they require from a usability point of view rather than necessarily doing, I mean would you build massive applications in something like jQuery?

    John:It’s absolutely possible and people do it all the time. For example, T-Mobile’s T-Online in Germany, they built their entire user area so like their mail, their calendar, and everything using jQuery. So it’s absolutely used for very large projects. What I think is very interesting for jQuery at least is that while we don’t explicitly provide the object-oriented styles that most hardcore developers are used to we provide some very interesting alternatives especially they way it, like functional programming that I think actually end up suiting development very well. It’s very different, I will completely grant that, but it’s still very capable of scaling quite large.

    Paul:So if people go out there and they have a kind of play around with these different libraries and try each of them out as you say to kind of find what fits their style of coding, once they’ve found something that kind of codes in the way they would like to, for example for me the similarities between jQuery and CSS made it a very natural fit, but what are the kind of things that you should look for from a functional perspective? What kind of things should be included in a JavaScript library? Does that make sense?

    John:At the very core there should be a set of features. Of the libraries that I listed previously they all have methods for doing DOM traversal, so traversing through an HTML document, modifying an HTML document, events, so handling user interaction, animations and AJAX. All of them have some support for that to one degree or another. You can be fairly safe in knowing that if you pick a library you will have that base level. In my opinion those sets of features are probably the most important features and the ones that you end up using the most with your applications. Some people might say in their particular case that maybe animations aren’t as important, or maybe that they aren’t using AJAX, it really depends but for most of the time that set of features is fairly comprehensive. On top of that you really have to start to, once you’ve tried to use it, and once you’ve played around, there’s a whole set of secondary features that you kind of have to dig into, ones that aren’t immediately code-related. Things like the community around a library, the documentation for a library and even the health of the projects themselves.

    Paul:What do you mean by that last one, the health of a project?

    John:There’s a lot of things. In health, do they have an active development team? Are there developers? Are there multiple developers? It’s the famous hit by a bus; if a developer is hit by a bus will the project still continue? Is there a team will continue? Can you view the source code? Is there a repository where you can go? Is there a bug tracker where you can submit bugs? And finally is there a test suite, is what you’re going to be using going to be tested and analyzed to make sure it stays working. Another point that’s important to bring up is that a lot of browsers now are starting to integrate the test suites of these libraries into their test suite. So for example actually this is a lot of my work at Mozilla, was integrating the test suites of Prototype, Scriptaculous, jQuery, MochiKit, a bunch of libraries into our test suite such that if we ever added a change that caused a regression to happen in a library we would catch it and we would fix it on our end. Obviously we would do this in a very smart way, we wouldn’t just blindly be like, “Oh something broke!” We would communicate to the library what the issue was or whatever and this has been very big because now you can, there’s an extra level of safety and security here, in that you’ll know that if you’re using a library like this that it’s going to continue to work going forward in these browsers. That’s an extra level of safety that your personal code can’t provide. I think that’s very interesting. I want to jump back here really quick to the other issues I mentioned.

    Paul:Sorry, I distracted you there and we took you off topic.

    John:It’s OK, it’s OK, of community and documentation. So community, it can be usually be pretty easy to determine the health of the community. All these libraries will have some sort of a mailing list or a forum that you can go to. Just hopping on there, seeing how many messages are posted, seeing what the typical response is like, how they treat new users, just stuff like that it can be really useful because if you’re just starting out, you know you’re going to have some pretty basic questions. Do they understand your problems? Do they help you out? Doing some searches on Google for example to see how many people are talking about it, or using a service like Technorati or something. Are people blogging about it? Is it positive? Are they having problems? The other thing is documentation. This is also pretty easy to tell. If you are starting out with a library, you’re probably going to start out by doing a quick test, running a simple application just to get a feel for it. When you’re doing that you’re immediately going to be in the documentation trying to figure out how things work. I think you’ll be able to determine pretty quickly if the documentation quality meets a standard that you, because if you aren’t, if the documentation just isn’t that good, you’ll immediately have problems and I guess you will have to resort to the mailing list or the forums or whatever. Secondary is, do they have good examples? Do they have books if you want to learn from a book? Do they have books that you can buy to learn from? So again there’s a whole lot of issues here but what a lot of it boils down to is looking at the libraries, looking at their style of code, does it seem alright with you? Then just doing a quick test with each of the libraries that you’ve picked out, building like a menu or just a basic form of interaction. How easy is it? How hard is it? Does it in fact mesh with you well? This is something you can do over the course of a single day and it definitely shouldn’t take you any longer th
    an that. If it’s taking longer than that then you probably want to try a different library. Ultimately you should be trying to use these libraries to make your development simpler and easier. If it doesn’t improve your productivity, if it doesn’t improve the quality of your code then you probably shouldn’t be using it to begin with.

    Paul:Tell us a little bit about the kind of plug-in architectures that exists around many JavaScript libraries. Certainly I know there’s a strong plug-in architecture with jQuery. Does the same kind of thing exist with other libraries?

    John:It depends. What jQuery has is a little bit unique in that we provide a number of plug-in points that plug-ins can snap into and extend how jQuery works. So they can add in new CSS selector behavior, or they can add in new events or all sorts of intricate additions. Other libraries have things that aren’t quite of the same vane, in that they’ll have modules or packages that you can use. Also another thing that varies is how do the various projects treat these plug-ins? At least with jQuery there’s a dedicated plug-in repository that’s used that plug-ins are listed in that you can browse through, you can see ratings, comments, discussions and things like that. Currently no other framework has something similar to that to the best of my knowledge. It’s much looser, just people uploading, putting things to their websites or Google code or some such. So again, at least to me, what makes plug-ins, jQuery-style plug-ins important is that they are, that there’s extension points and that they are supported by jQuery fully.

    Paul: The only thing that I think that I kind of struggle with a little bit about plug-ins, you know I love the idea that there are other people out there that can do the hard work for me in that they can develop something I was looking for, and I love the fact that I can go to jQuery, I can type in whatever I’m looking for and it will pull back stuff. I’m always a bit unsure mind about how reliable those plug-ins are, you know as you’ve been saying with the kind of, the core jQuery library that you’ve created I know there’s a big team of developers working on it, I know that it’s thoroughly tested, I know what browsers it’s tested against, all of that kind of stuff. Plug-ins are a bit more of an unknown entity. Is there any kind of advice that you can provide about judging whether a plug-in or module or whatever is reliable or not?

    John:I mean you sort of have to use the same standards that you would use in looking at a library. Looking at, what you mentioned, is it tested? Is there good documentation? Are there, how many developers are working on it? Like for example in the jQuery project we started a sort of, sub-project called jQuery Glide in which we’ve taken a whole bunch of plug-ins and actually blessed them and proved them, given them themes, excellent documentation, examples, all this stuff and made them sort of official. We’re doing this more and more, trying to bring in more plug-ins, improve their quality and make sure that they’re up to our standards. There’s still tons and tons of plug-ins that are just excellent, but the issue comes down to that you have to sort of train your eye to look at, and be able to spot when something has good quality. The thing that’s easiest for a plug-in author or a library author to do is to just set up a page that has their code on it and has a basic example. At the very least every single library is going to have that. If you dig in and see that it has documentation, that it has tests, you begin to realize that that plug-in is a much higher quality, at the very least. I think it’s really starting to dig in to these side issues, that you begin to get a better picture of how, of the true nature and of the true health of a particular library.

    Paul:Excellent! That’s really useful and I think it’s easy to just look at these libraries and indeed the plug-ins as well and ask, “Well do they have the basic functionality that I require?” But, like you say, looking at things like the community and documentation and things like that are equally important. It’s been very useful John. Thank you for taking the time to come on the show. No doubt we will get you back in the future to talk about some of the specific things going on with jQuery and maybe this book that you’re writing as well, sounds very good. Thanks for your time.

    John:Thanks for having me, Thank you.

    Thanks to Todd Dietrich for transcribing this interview.

    Back to top

    Listeners feedback:

    Quality or Quickly?

    What is more important, to reach market quickly or to launch with a quality product?

    I received this question from Pete in South Africa…

    I have been working on a small web application, which I hope to launch soon. My problem is that I am spending ages tweaking and improving it before launch. I fear that if I spend much longer on it somebody will beat me to market. What is more important, getting the product right or launching it quickly?

    It is a good question and one with no single answer. It is certainly something we have been struggling with as we prepare to launch GetSignOff.

    To read the rest of this blog click here.

    Back to top

    134. Chrome

    Posted in Classic shows on by Paul Boag

    In this weeks show we give you advice on choosing the right hosting company, Teifion and John send us a review of dConstruct and of course we discuss the release of Google Chrome, can it topple IE?

    Download this show.

    Launch our podcast player

    News and events

    Managing and choosing fonts

    With the new generation of browsers supporting embedded fonts in a consistent way, it is time for us as web designers to start taking typography serious.

    One small part of this is how we manage and choose fonts. I confess, I have put little thought into font management. The result is that my choice of font is often not as thought through as it should be. A massive drop-down list in Photoshop does not inspire considered typography.

    However, a couple of discovers this week have inspired me to put more thought into the subject.

    The first is a review of 25 font management tools. This include both free and paid for software. It also has options for both the Mac, PC and even Linux.

    You might ask why we need a font management tool at all. Trust me, if you start installing a lot of fonts on your system you will soon discover why. Large number of fonts become unmanageable and can cause serious performance problems. As a minimum you need an easy way to enable or disable fonts.

    The second discovery was an online/AIR font application that displays text of your choice in every font available on your system. This in itself makes font selection much easier. However, this application also enables you to narrow the field by removing unsuitable fonts. It is a great visual way of getting the right typographic look.

    jQuery supercharges menu rollovers

    Although I am a standards based designer through and through, I have always felt like the nerd in the class. After all it is the Flash kids that get all the girls and attract all the attention with their cool (if somewhat inaccessible) animations and effects.

    4 years ago Dave Shea attempted to smarten up our image a little with CSS Sprites. This was a technique for doing CSS based rollovers on menu items. It wasn’t as eye catching as Flash but it was a start and at least I didn’t feel dirty after I used it.

    Jump forward to the present and we find a world where the ‘cool divide’ has been reduced thanks to Javascript. Dave therefore felt the need to bring his CSS sprite technique up-to-date on A List Apart, using a sprinkling of Javascript.

    Using jQuery Dave takes the plain old CSS sprite menu and gives it an attractive new look. However, at the same time he maintains its accessibility thanks to progressive enhancement.

    It is a slightly long winded article (like I can talk!) in places nevertheless it is a nice illustration of what jQuery and CSS are capable of. It is also a technique we can all make use of right now, something A List Apart has been missing sometimes of late.

    Can Google Chrome Topple IE?

    Without a doubt the biggest story of the week is that Google has launched its own browser called Chrome. At the moment the browser is only available for windows although a mac and linux will follow shortly.

    More on my thoughts can be found here

    Back to top

    Feature: Choosing a Hosting Company

    Hosting companies are a dime a dozen. They all offer very similar packages and all seem competitive on price. How then do you choose between them. We discuss this in this weeks feature.

    Back to top

    Review: dConstruct

    Teifion: And the next part of the podcast is sponsored by Ticklefish Design and Searchlight Digital.

    John: Hi I’m Marcus Lillington.

    Teifion: No I want to be Marcus Lillington. Marcus is the cool one he doesn’t get my name too wrong.

    John: No no. You agreed that we would both be Marcus.

    Teifion: That’s a fair compromise. No one want’s to be Paul. Anyway right. On with the show. So Marcus what did you generally think of the conference?

    John: I thought it was really good actually. Yeah I enjoyed it all. I enjoyed the free coffee.

    Teifion: Which you didn’t tell me about till right at the end so I only got one cup.

    John: No that’s right.

    Teifion: I thought I was a bit unfair.

    John: I thought it was sort of obvious there was free coffee. But with regards to the speakers, yeah I enjoyed all of them. Some of the speakers were speaking about things I don’t really you know, I’m not involved with directly but they all put their points across really well. I enjoyed all of them. I think I can take something away from each speaker. What did you think?

    Teifion: I quite liked the fact that none of them talked for too long or too little. They were all quite engrossing and though again not directly related to what I do they were all very interesting and I did end up taking something away from it.

    John: Yeah and there was humour in there as well.

    Teifion: Oh there was Matt and Matt are hilarious.

    John: Yeah Matt and Matt get the award for comic.

    Teifion: With that subject what was your favorite talk during it?

    John: My favorite talk was Tantek on microformats.

    Teifion: Okay summarize roughly what he talked about. Except microformats that just kinda basic.

    John: Yeah it is really. You know the concept of how microformats are I don’t really know what I’m saying again.

    Teifion: Just keep going Paul does.

    John: Yeah just how you shouldn’t have to keep reinputting data into all these different sites, all these different social networks that we go on. They should all, you know there should be one sort of central hub which is your sort of central place where you put all your details in and all these other sites that you choose to join up to and put information on. They should all just link up. Microformats again is a new subject to me. I’ve only done a basic vCard and that’s about it. It’s definitely something I’m going to read into.

    Teifion: I’ll definitely agree with that summary.

    John: Although a little long winded.

    Teifion: No not long winded at all. Remember the people who listen to this are used to listening to Paul.

    John: Yeah that’s true.

    Teifion: Well I’d say that my favorite talk was Jeremy Keith on the system of the world it’s titled. I would have titled it something more like "Why the cloud can be smart and why it can be stupid. Why you think you can predict it and why you really can’t." It was a great intellectual talk and I’m pretty sure that most of it went over my head. Possibly into the head of who ever was sitting behind me. He basically said that you can’t predict what will be the next big thing like Facebook or Twitter but you can create good foundations or nurture something so that it’s more likely to be the next big thing.

    John: Yeah that’s a good summary there as well. I mean basically I thought it was just about a black swan.

    Teifion: That is true actually. It’s just all about the black swan. You can’t predict it. It’s got a big effect and after it you’ll all go back and say "Hey we knew this was coming.

    John: We knew this black swan was going to be born.

    Teifion: Yeah that’s how it works isn’t it. Tell you what, what do you think the best moment of the conference was to you?

    John: Ah. I mean there’s a lot of moments but the best moment has got to be Teifion, as Marcus calls you, when you went up to Ryan Carson to thank him for the free complimentary tickets to dConstruct.

    Teifion: I’d like to point out that yesterday as in the day before the conference I had a 5 hour train journey from South Wales to Brighton. I then went to bed really late and got up really early. I was really tired and confused.

    John: Still no excuse. You call yourself a student.

    Teifion: No I’m a graduate.

    John: Oh okay. There’s a slight difference. But luckily for Teifion I pulled him back at the last moment to save his ???? it wasn’t Carsonified that supplied the tickets it was Clearleft.

    Teifion: I knew it was Clearleft that supplied the tickets. I just got confused. Tall guys in hats are very confusing.

    John: What about you? What was your favorite moment?

    Teifion: I think it was when we actually went up to thank Jeremy for putting the whole event on and for possibly the free tickets. It wasn’t actually Jeremy that we needed to thank aparently. I like the way that you sort of thought how to do it. You went for the wussy catch his eye approach. I just walked up and said "hi thanks for the tickets. Have a business card." I didn’t actually give him a business card.

    John: No but that is a funny point. Tef did hand out quite a few business cards. Which is good I mean networking is really good. Apart from the lady who you tried to impose your business card on.

    Teifion: I don’t think she heard me.

    John: No she just blanked you.

    Teifion: It’s possible. It’s happened before. You remember why we went to see Jeremy don’t you. It’s because sadly Marcus your jokes are sadly not up to the calibre that we would like. Granted their not dire, I mean if Paul was in charge of it they would be dire or worse. But I think Marcus’ jokes could do with some improvements. So we went up to Jeremy to ask him for a joke. Do you want to tell the joke.

    John: Yeah I would love to tell a joke. Apart from the fact that I actually can’t remember it. But seeing as you already knew it and knew the punch line you can tell it.

    Teifion: Okay why did the chicken cross the mobile strip?

    John: I don’t know. Why did the chicken cross the mobile strip?

    Teifion: To get to the same side. If you don’t know what a mobile strip is Google it.

    John: Unfortunately I don’t.

    Teifion: That’s a shame. Well I suppose we’re hitting the 6 minute mark which if we were Paul we’d go "Well lets start on the news." or maybe waffle on a bit more. We’re actually going to have to conclude this partly because it’s not our own podcast. So I figured what we could do is we can end it with a question. What do you think of that idea?

    John: Good idea.

    Teifion: Well what I’m going to do now is I’m going to put you on the spot and I’m going to pause it for 30 seconds and you are going to come up with a question and then you’re going to ask it.

    John: Brilliant. Was that the pause?

    Teifion: Yes a good long 30 seconds.

    John: I thought you were just going to do a pretend pause and then we’d just go right into it.

    Teifion: No that would be something that Paul would do. Paul’s not cool.

    John: My question to both of you Paul and Marcus is, "Would you advise up and coming web designers or developers to email and get in contact with local agencies with regards to getting some kind of work experience with them? Even if it’s only for like a day or two." So that’s my question.

    Teifion: Fair enough. I suppose I could add a sort of additional question. It is "If you put so much effort into your work Paul you presume you put a lot of effort in to your family like. I know you put a lot of effort into youth work. Why is it so hard for you to put just a little tiny bit of effort into learning how to pronounce a name that so many people I know can so easily pronounce? It’s (he didn’t spell it so I don’t know). It’s really not that hard.

    John: Teifion

    Teifion: See if you knew me for longer you’d be able to pronounce it. Maybe Paul’s just not cool enough.

    John: Maybe you should all just call him Ty from now on.

    Teifion: That could work. Anyway that’s it.

    John: O I’ve got one more point. Stanton.

    Teifion: Where is Stanton?

    John: Stanton we agree well we met him. He said he wanted to help and come in and say a few words at the end of the podcast but we don’t know where he is. He was last seen

    Teifion: chatting up randoms.

    John: Yeah that sums it up.

    Teifion: I could guess at what he would say I could be completely wrong though.

    John: I think we should end it on that note.

    Teifion: Bye.

    John: Bye.

    Thanks goes to Curtis McHale for transcribing this review.

    Back to top

    Fixed Footers without JavaScript

    Posted in Development on by Paul Boag

    Ed Merritt (one of our very awfully clever designers at Headscape) has come up with a innovative little CSS technique I have encouraged him to share with you.

    A client recently asked me if it was possible to have a page footer which would stick to the bottom of the browser window if the content didn’t fill the window, but behave normally (i.e. be pushed down by the content) when the content was tall enough.

    This footer behaviour is not a new idea; I’ve seen it on a few sites over the years, the most well known probably being version 7 of Shaun Inman’s site. Take a look at the ‘Work’ page with JavaScript enabled, then disabled to see the effect in action.

    I suspect that this behaviour, which can look great in the right situation, has not been widely adopted because existing solutions have always relied on JavaScript for what should be a simple presentation issue.

    The technique described in this article is purely a CSS solution and works in all modern browsers, tested down to IE5.5.

    Firstly, here’s a demonstration.

    The HTML

    <div id="container"> <div id="content"></div> <div id="footer"></div> </div>

    The CSS

    *, body {margin: 0; padding: 0;} #container {display: block; position: absolute; min-height: 100%;} #content {display: block; margin-bottom: 3em;} #footer {position: absolute; display: block; bottom: 0; height: 3em }

    IE6 Stylesheet

    body, #container {height: 100%;}

    this should be referenced using a conditional comment:

    <!--[if lt IE 7]> <link href="css/ie6.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" media="screen"   /> <![endif]-->

    How it works

    As you can see, the mark-up and styling are pretty simple. Here’s a quick run-through of what’s going on…

    • #container is set to be at least as tall as the browser window using min-height and although IE6 doesn’t understand this, it treats height in exactly the same way. #container must be positioned absolutely, or this will not work.
    • #footer is positioned absolutely at the bottom of #container
    • #content is given a bottom margin equal to the height of #footer to prevent the two ever overlapping.

    Known Issues

    The simplicity of this technique makes it fairly reliable and the only real issues to consider are for IE6 and below. For these browsers you’ll need to specify any additional containers as also having a height of 100%.

    For example, if your mark-up was:

    <div id="extraContainer"> <div id="container"> <div id="content"></div> <div id="footer"></div> </div> </div>

    In your IE specific CSS you’d need to specify:

    body, #extraContainer, #container {height: 100%;}

    Conclusion

    This is a nice and easy solution to those unsightly gaps below your footers and while it won’t be appropriate for every site, it might come in handy from time to time. Please let me know if you find any problems with it.

    131. Version Control

    Posted in Classic shows on by Paul Boag

    In this weeks show Ryan and Stanton return to talk about the importance of version control and answer your questions on project  management and invoicing applications, download sizes and page weight.

    Play

    Podcast: Download (17.8MB)

    Download this show.

    Launch our podcast player

    News and events

    Twitter Cuts UK SMS

    This week the team over at Twitter announced that they would no longer be delivering outbound SMS over there UK number. They go on to explain that the bill which up until now they’ve been footing is simply too great and that even with a limit of 250 messages per week they estimate a yearly cost of $1000 per user.

    Thanks to established relationships with SMS services in Canada, India and the United States the outbound SMS service will be continuing uninterrupted in those countries.

    Twitter has suggested a number of alternatives to the service, links to which can be found on their blog. It would also appear that a number of start-ups are rushing to fill the void as TechCrunch have also reported.

    A large portion of Twitters popularity is due to their SMS facilities and it is feared that “freezing” out the UK and other countries from this service will be detrimental to their future.

    It reminds me of when Pandora, the online radio station, closed its doors entirely to its UK audience due to licensing constraints and it begs to question do we poor souls in the UK miss out on all the good toys?

    facelift (FLIR) Image Replacement for Fonts

    Facelift Image Replacement (or FLIR, pronounced fleer) is an image replacement script that dynamically generates image representations of text on your web page in fonts that aren’t otherwise supported in web browsers. The generated image is automatically placed on your site and works in a similar way to sIFR, the big difference being the lack of Flash.

    This script uses PHP and javaScript and utilises actual .ttf font files to generate its replacement images, so you can simply specify which elements you want to replace, h1, h2 tags etc, download a font you want to use, point the script to it and your done.

    I’m looking forward to having a play with this script as it seems to be simple to use and the fact that you don’t have to mess around with Flash like you do with sIFR is a big bonus in my book.

    Take a look at the number of examples they have on their website and see for yourself.

    Gmail went down!

    So Gmail went down for a few hours this week and as Josh Catone said in his sitepoint article article:

    Judging by the reactions on Twitter and in the blogosphere, you’d have thought that the world ended.

    There’s nothing really more we can say about this that Josh hasn’t already mentioned, but suffice it to say, no web sites/app is going to have 100% up time and this echoes what Stanton and I were talking about the other week in regards to S3 going down. It’s important to always have a backup and not to put all your eggs in one basket because when the service you’re using goes down, and invariably it will, you need a plan B.

    Back to top

    And Now For Something Completely Random

    During the recording of this weeks podcast we were thrown completely when we spotted Paul Annett from Clear:Left dressed up as a Gorilla on Yahoo Live! and then proceeded to start dancing… always aiming to share the hysterics here’s proof. Random indeed.

    Paul Annett Dresses as a Gorilla

    Feature: To Version Control or Not?

    Version control can seem like a very daunting thing to incorporate into your work flow, but once it’s there you can be left wondering how you ever lived without it. In this week’s feature Stanton shares his experiences with you in a bid to convince you why you need it.

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    Listeners feedback:

    Project Management and Invoicing Applications

    James writes: I would like some boagworld advice. I’m a web designer and SharePoint specialist at a large company in Cambridge, UK. Over the last 3 to 4 years i have been messing around with web design etc. I now am very busy outside of work and it is getting busier every month.

    I started of with a server under the bed at home with UPS hosting these sites. They ranged from personal sites, to company profile pages to shops. This server has now been replaced with a VPS hosted externally.

    My plan is to keep working full time and manage my time very carefully outside of work and keep these sites coming in and out etc and then one day take the big leap into the self-employed world.

    What could you recommend for me to manage my tasks, projects, time-management and invoicing etc?

    I love the podcast and would be quite happy to chat further with you. Look forward to hearing your experience comments.

    Well there is a multitude of online and desktop applications designed specifically for managing your business.

    Probably the most popular project management app I know of is 37 Signals’ BaseCamp and that’s certainly the first one that springs to mind when I’m asked this question. Depending on what package you have, BaseCamp allows you to create projects, set milestones, to-do lists, manage time spent on tasks among other things, however BaseCamp is tailored more towards collaborative projects for when you’re working with a team of people. It doesn’t provide facilities for invoicing clients and managing your accounts and so it might not be the perfect choice if you working alone.

    Another app I know of and which comes highly recommended is FreeAgent. FreeAgent like BaseCamp allows you to create and manage projects, clients and timescales, however in addition it provides you with the facility to generate invoices, manage your bank accounts as well as your expenses and incomes. It’s designed for sole traders, partnerships and limited companies and is wrapped up in a nice, user friendly interface.

    A final mention goes to a Microsoft app that I came across a couple of years ago now, and has only this year been release in the UK. It’s called Office Accouting Express 2008 and it’s actually free to download and use. As you would expect it integrates with other Office applications and provides you with all the facilities you would expect from an accounting package, invoicing, client management etc. So if you’re working on a PC it’s worth having a look.

    Luckily you can have a play with all these apps before you buy. BaseCamp has a free account which allows you to create 1 project so you can get in and see how it all works, FreeAgent has a series of demos you can use to see if the interface and facilities are to your liking and as I’ve said Office Accounting Express is free. So my advice would be check out them al
    l and see what works for you and no doubt there will be several suggestions in the show comments on other apps that I haven’t mentioned here.

    Download Sizes

    Bob writes: After reading a recent post from Smashing Magazine on textures I started to wonder… what is a good rule of thumb regarding document size per page on the web? Most of the example pages in the article ranked in at close to 900kb per page… am I behind the times?

    Very good question, and one I think we all worry about at points. There’s more than just the filesize to really worry about, there’s the general ‘page weight’ which is affected by many factors, such as:

    • The number of HTTP requests made – if you’re pulling in a lot of external javaScript or CSS files, each one has to be requested seperately. You can combine these into single files to reduce load times, but at the expense of readability, maintainability and organisation
    • The size of any javaScript files you’re pulling in – you can get minified versions of most libraries, for example, which strip out all the extra spaces and line breaks in the code, which aren’t needed in order for the code to execute
    • CSS expressions can be a useful tool, but are bloody slow, especially when used a lot
    • Image filesize can have a massive effect on load times, which is one of your main concerns as you mentioned textures. I’m assuming you’re already familiar with image optimisation, but also test to see if you can squeeze images into a GIF, or a PNG8 if possible, these formats will give you a nice small filesize if you only need a limited colour pallete.

    In this day and age it’s nice to think that we’re all cruising on nice fast broadband connections, but in reality we know that’s not the case and you really have to consider your audience, and the context in which they may visit your site (Paul’s talked about this quite recently). If you expect an older demographic to your site, or people in remote areas, then they might still be hitting you on a dial up connection. Some visitors may be using poor public wifi (I get suicidal on the train to and from London as the wifi is usually worse than dial-up), or mobile devices where the data charges can be ridiculously high.

    There are a couple of tools I use to get an idea of how my pages weigh in:

    There is a Firebug addon called YSlow which provides some nifty statistics on what’s happening under the hood of the pages you visit, and also grades the page performance and suggests methods to improve the loading time of your page.

    I tested 2 sites quickly with this extension to give an idea of what you can expect to see, Amazon and Boagworld.

    • Amazon.com weighs in at 501k with 85 HTTP requests and a performance rating of D
    • Boagworld.com is a bit lighter on it’s feet at 57.6k and 79 HTTP requests, but has a performance rating of F, due to (among other things) including 37 external javascript files compared to Amazon’s 8, and 33 CSS background images compared to 9 with Amazon.

    I also use a Firefox plugin called Firefox Throttle which lets you simulate a specific network speed (such as 56k) and get an idea of how long your site will take on certain connections.

    Unfortunately I don’t think there’s a good rule of thumb here. Personally, I don’t let the page weight issue affect or limit my design, but try and make savings where I can nearer the end of the project, by optimising images, switching to minified JS libraries and reducing the amount of HTTP requests where possible.

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    130. Air

    Posted in Classic shows on by Paul Boag

    On this week’s show; Paul talks about better understanding disabled users. We have a tip from Jeremy about problem solving and Jonathan Snook introduces us to Adobe Air.

    Download this show.

    Launch our podcast player

    Housekeeping

    A few pieces of housekeeping I wanted to quickly mention at the start of this week’s show.

    • FOWA – The guys over at Carsonified have been kind enough to offer boagworld listeners a 15% discount off of the upcoming Future of Web Apps conference in London. The conference takes place between the 8-10 October and is an absolutely superb event. To claim your discount use the code FOWA-bw at checkout. There are only 50 discounted places, so be quick.
    • SXSW – Talking of conferences can I ask a favour of you all. Marcus is desperate to go to next years SXSW conference in Texas. However he is only allowed to go if he is speaking. As you may know speakers for SXSW are chosen using a voting system. So, in order for Marcus to attend SXSW he needs your votes. Give an old popstar a second chance. Go vote for him now!
    • Think Vitamin - Finally I just thought I would quickly mention an article I have recently written for the Think Vitamin website. It is entitled "the 5 hidden costs of running a CMS" and I thought you might be interested in check it out. It is an extract from chapter 8 of my book the Website Owners Manual, which as I have said many times before, you can download right now ;)

    News and events

    Designing for emotion and flow

    Not long ago I wrote an article for boagworld on the importance of context. In that article I highlighted elements such as time, mood and environment as key factors that contribute to a users context when accessing your site. This context directly impacts how the user interacts with your site. What I didn’t tackle in my article is exactly how context should affect the way you design.

    An article called "Design for Emotion and Flow" on the boxes and arrows website, takes my post a step further by going into a lot more detail about what affects users behaviour and how we should design in a way that accommodates their state of mind.

    Its quite an in-depth article but worth the read. It touches on user physiology as well as issues of environment and although it can be slightly theoretical at times, it focuses in on what you can practically do towards the end.

    Articles like this always leave me with mixed feelings. They can easily feel overly analytical to the point where you wonder if they are applicable in the real world. However, in my experience if you take the time to read and digest them, they start to influence the way you design on an almost subconscious level.

    7 essential guidelines to functional design

    By contrast our next article is much more down to earth. The "7 Essential guidelines to functional design" is another post by smashing magazine and focuses on some fundamentals of good design.

    However, don’t get the impression that this is just an article for designers. The principles it talks about also apply to developers and website owners. Basics such as the goal and audience for your site are things everybody should be considering.

    According to Smashing Magazine the 7 essential guidelines to functional design are:

    • Consider our product’s goal
    • Consider who will be using it
    • Consider what your audience intends to do with it
    • Is it clear how to use it?
    • How does your user know it’s working?
    • Is it engaging to your users?
    • How does it handle mistakes?

    Whether this is the definitive list, I am not so sure. However, it is a worthwhile read especially if you are just starting out.

    15 companies that really get corporate blogging

    While we are on the subject of lists our next post is "15 companies that really get corporate blogging". What can I say, I am a sucker for a list!

    This one is really for those of you who run a website and in particular run a corporate blog. As the name suggests it lists companies that do a good job at blogging. However, it is not the list that attracted me to this article, it is the reason why the companies got on the list.

    There is a lot of good advice to be gleaned from this post. Just a few snippets I picked up include:

    • Don’t just pimp your products, talk about other stuff too
    • Post regularly
    • Encourage conversation
    • Be candid and open
    • Offer advice and lessons you have learnt

    The list could go on. Corporate blogging is by and large a disaster with many companies just failing to ‘get it’. According to a recent report, 56% of corporate blogs just republish press releases and two thirds hardly ever receive comments. However, as is highlighted in this post there are a growing number of organisations that are doing things right and we should follow their example.

    Learning from signage

    If you have listened to this show for any length of time you will know I am a great fan of looking beyond the web for inspiration. I also believe there a lot to be learnt from other forms of design including signage.

    It would appear that Mark Boulton would agree with this sentiment judging by his recent post on airport signage. Mark, compares the signage in two airports and looks at how the lessons learnt apply to web design.

    Some of the gems he discovered include:

    • Signage should work without colour coding
    • Only designers care about fonts
    • Don’t rely too heavily on pictograms
    • Always put your ideas to the test

    This is a great article which should (if nothing else) encourage you to look at the world around you for inspiration.

    Back to top

    Interview: Johnathan Snook on Adobe Air

    Paul: Joining me today is Johnathan Snook who I recently saw at the @Media conference. It was great to see you there again Johnathon.

    Johnathan: A pleasure to see you there as well.

    Paul: You really got me with your presentation. It was an excellent presentation. Very, very enjoyable, and you touched on the subject of Adobe Air. It wasn’t the main thrust of the presentation, but it was the bit that really grabbed my attention so I thought "let’s get you on the show and have a bit of a chat about it" if that’s O.K. with you.

    Johnathan: Absolutely.

    Paul: Good. So, let’s start from the absolute basics so that we’re all on the same page. Could you just explain very briefly what Adobe Air is so that people that haven’t come across it before kind of know what it does.

    Johnathan: Certainly. Adobe Air is a development platform for making desktop applications to make desktop applications cross-platform. So, something that you build once and that would work on Windows, Mac OSX as well as Linux.

    Paul: O.K. And this is built using web technologies…

    Johnathan: Yeah, It’s really great that they’ve managed to leverage what they know things like Flash, Flex, and really the kicker is being able to develop desktop applications using HTML, CSS and JavaScript that, obviously, a lot of us web developers are going to be familiar with.

    Paul: Sure. So, I mean that’s I guess why we’ve included it on the show even though it’s a web design podcast, that kind of line between the web and desktop applications seems to be blurring and Air is a big part of that. What drove you to kind of investigate it and kind of look into Air as a product?

    Johnathan: For me, it was just a curiosity. The platform, what it could do, knowing that I could create a cross-platform desktop application was kind of enticing. When we build for the web we’re trying to do things as cross-platform as possible make sure that we target as many browsers as we can, and really be able to reach out to the people and do really cool things. So, for me it was like, O.K., well what can I do with this what are the possibilities. One of the first things that went off in my brain was building a Twitter application. At the time, when Twitter was up for more than 24 hours straight, it was kind of cool to be able to build a desktop application to kind of separate out from the web, because the web site was frustrating me to know end, and to be able to put in stuff that made the site more usable for me and in the end was a tool that I got to use every day and that I enjoyed to use.

    Paul: Cool. I’ve kind of got a basic understanding of it. I understand what it does and I understand the kind of technologies that exist under it, but can you kind of give me an idea of, you know, how it works as such. I know how to create an HTML page, CSS and Javascript and stuff like that. How do I get from there into turning it into a Air application?

    Johnathan: It’s surprisingly quite easy. What happens is, if you look at the Air runtime, is it essentially runs your Air application, so you don’t create a .exe file or a .dwg file you don’t create an executable in the traditional sense. What you end up doing is creating a .air file that you use to distribute. The Air runtime actually handles that. Building that .air file, there is an SDK available from Adobe that allows you to compile this Air file. So, those Air files are pretty straight forward, they’re really just like a ZIP file with some extra information in it. So, to create an actual Air application, you can do it just using a normal text editor, you can do with specific IDEs like Eclipse. If you’re into Flex development, they have Flex builder. If you’re into just doing HTML and CSS kind of thing, you might want to look into Aptana they have Air support built right in. If you’re a fan of Dreamweaver, there’s a Dreamweaver extension for automatically compiling your application, and being able to set properties on your application. So, things like how big should the window be when it opens up, can I resize it, what kind of stuff can I do with it. That obviously, in this GUI sense, to a certain degree can make things a lot easier. So, I think there are a lot of benefits to using an IDE with built in support, but you don’t have to. There is the capability of just using a normal text editor and then running the SDK command line sequences to actually generate the Air file. It is really straight forward.

    Paul: So, the one selling feature or one thing about Air that’s been promoted quite heavily is the fact that you can take online applications offline in a sense. The application is still usable even if you’re not connected to the Internet at a particular point in time. I think they showed off, right from the beginning, an eBay example of that where you could do all kinds of things offline, and then when you connected it was all uploaded. How does that kind of process work? There must be some kind of local database that’s running, one presumes.

    Johnathan: That’s correct. I think some people may be familiar with Google Gears in having the local storage using the SQLite database. Adobe Air actually does something very similar. They do have a local SQLite database that you’ve seen create local databases and store any information there. There’s actually different ways. You have access to the local file system, so you can certainly write new files. Say, if you wanted to create new text files, xml files, new binary formats. So, if you wanted to create an image editing software that stores files in a binary format, you could do that. So, there’s a lot of flexibility there because you do have some access to the local system. You have network connectivity, so you can do either regular AJAX calls or you can do socket connections. You can connect to web servers. You can connect to remote database servers. You’ve got a lot of flexibility and a lot of control because of that.

    Paul: You seem quite enthusiastic about the development environment. What has been your impression of it. Was it something that was a steep learning curve, but when you get there it’s really cool, or is it easy straight out of the box? What were your impressions?

    Johnathan: I think it’s going to depend on what it is you’re trying to do. I think that there are going to be some frustrations. There are going to be some things that you have to understand about the environment. To give you an example; the HTML/CSS stuff is pretty cool it basically runs on a WebKit engine, which is the same engine that powers Safari. That gives you a lot of control and stuff, but ultimately that WebKit engine is still running within a Flash runtime. So, there are some limitations to that because of the fact that Adobe just simply hasn’t built in certain support. Things like support for double byte character encoding, so Chinese and Japanese character sets can be more difficult. However, they are working on that. Version 1.1 is supposed to be coming out soon it will have support for that, but right now you’re limited because of that.

    Paul: What kind of people should be delving into this. Is this the kind of thing that only a hardcore developer like yourself should be touching or is it something that somebody like myself that would be a front-end interface designer should I even bother picking it up or am I better keeping away?

    Johnathan: It’s really easy to develop in. I think you can make really quick solutions really straight forward. To give you a comparison; there is a Mac software called Fluid for creating site applications, but that is separated from the browser. You can kind of plot the same kind of things with Adobe Air because you do have that WebKit engine. You can basically use it as a browser. So, to give you a quick example; Muxtape, which is an online mix-taping thing you upload MP3s, and then people can go to your page and listen to your mix tape… The problem is that if you accidentally close the browser, you lose that information. I think there are a lot of websites that have this stickiness factor where you want to decouple the application from the browser. So, I put together a really basic example in which you type in a URL and it loads up a mix tape. That’s a very straight forward interface, but to be able to do that in a desktop application that I can minimize to the dock or the system tray is something that is, I think, a lot more appealing than running this kind of stuff through the web browser. And, it was really easy to put together. I spent about an hour one evening to put that kind of thing … I mean it is a very basic prototype, but the fact is that it is very straight forward to put that together. So, I think if web developers have ideas, they can really take advantage of that and build pretty cool stuff.

    Paul: So, it’s not something we need to be intimidated of, then.

    Johnathan: No, absolutely not.

    Paul: The other thing that maybe is a bit of a concern to us very standards-based designers in comparison to the Flash community is that Adobe says we support CSS and HTML, as well as Flash, but obviously Flash is their product. You kind of get this feeling that they’re going to always support Flash more and that CSS and HTMl are a bit of an afterthought. Is that the case, or is that unfounded?

    Johnathan: To a certain degree, it is the case. It’s, I think, unfortunate. I think they are more familiar with Flash. They’re more familiar with that environment. So, as you try to build the equivalent of a browser within this Flash runtime it’s going to be extremely difficult and I think things are going to get missed. And, I saw that sort of along the Beta process. Things like no support for "undo." I mean, that’s a pretty basic thing, but the fact that that’s not built in there does hamper people trying to build HTML-based applications. It works great in Flash-based applications and then what you end up running into is, to give you another example with Snitter, my little desktop Twitter application because it’s built using HTML and CSS, it had certain limitations, but there’s other Twitter clients built with Adobe Air that were built using Flash that actually have different limitations. So, people would say, "Well this application can do it just fine. Why can’t yours?" You have to kind of explain to them that it’s because of the limitations of how the environment was developed. Despite the fact that they are both still Adobe Air applications, technically they’re done differently and there are maybe more limitations as a result of that.

    Paul: Is there an opportunity to mix Flash and XHTML and CSS and whatever else together, or do you have to make this decision up front?

    Johnathan: No, absolutely not. Certainly, within the Adobe Air environment, you have that flexibility to create these little hybrid applications. I think Snitter, for example, is a good example of it. There’s a lot of Flash components out there that can do certain things. For example, a bunch of folks made an iMap component, so you can actually connect to an iMap server. However, that component is Flash-based. Another component out there that I saw was a Jabber client. So, let’s say you wanted to do a GMail chat client or some other Jabber-connected application, you can import those Flash runtimes into your application and use them from Javascript. So, you do have that flexibility to use both technologies and take advantage of that. I’ve certainly done that with Snitter, and I’ve done that with other applications as well because we have that flexibility of the environment. I think there is that sort of understanding that you can do that, and actually look out for the solutions that not only are HTML and Javascript, but that are Flash-based as well and come up with new ways of thinking because I think, traditionally, as web developers, we tend to separate those two as much as we can.

    Paul: That’s quite interesting. You talked about this kind of hybrid approach of combining Flash and HTML at @Media combining them together and about how we had some fears as standards-based designers of even touching Flash in any kind of context. Is that a kind of approach that you would apply beyond Air to the web generally?

    Johnathan: Absolutely. I think MuxTape is a great example of that. To be able to play MP3s isn’t something that’s easily done using Javascript. However, you can take advantage of Flash and use its capabilities to play MP3s to create new interfaces that aren’t specifically 100% Flash-based; that we have something that’s still HTML and Javascript that interacts in ways that I think a lot of us are comfortable with, but still have access to a lot of features that Flash offers to us you know, the fact that we can create the bridge between the two; we can do that on the web just as well as we can do that within Adobe Air.

    Paul: O.K. That all sounds very interesting and it certainly has made me want to kind of pick up Air and have a play with it and kind of get my hands dirty. I guess, perhaps as the last question then, is what tips would you give to people like me that haven’t yet touched Air and are considering having a play. What are the big traps to avoid? What are the good things to start with. Where should I begin the journey, so to speak?

    Johnathan: I think probably one of the first things you should do is head over to the Adobe web site. They have a number of really good resources to start off with. Obviously, you’re going to need the SDK so you can actually build your applications, but they also have the dev center where they have a number of introductory articles to learn how to build applications and it doesn’t mean those applications have to be built using Adobe applications like Dreamweaver, you can certainly do them without. So, there’s a lot of really good tutorials on there. From there, they lead off to a number of resources outside of Adobe that would certainly help you get started.

    Paul: What about mistakes? What were the big mistakes you made up front that, with hindsight, you would avoid? Or, did you get it right the first time?

    Johnathan: I don’t make mistakes! Well, I think one of the cool things about the environment is certainly the flexibility to take advantage of a lot of advanced CSS. Because you are using the WebKit engine which, when it comes to CSS 3 support, is one of the most advanced, you know that you have support for things like rounded corners, border radius, that you have support for multiple backgrounds, image-based borders you can do some really cool stuff with that that is really fun to play around with. You can create transparent applications, so if you wanted something that was completely and uniquely shaped, you can do these really cool things. The downfall for that is that you can quickly start running into performance issues. If you start creating all of these alpha PNGs that are layered over the top of each other, they give you a lot of flexibility, but unfortunately are a performance drain on how much your system can actually handle. I think that was one of my initial mistakes going in and saying "Wow, I’ve got all of this stuff that I can use let me throw everything at it" and then realizing that, you know, maybe that wasn’t the best solution. I think we still have to be wise in considering how we structure our CSS, how do we structure the design in such a way that, while it’s still flexible, it still does things from a performance-minded aspect so we’re not doing things that are going to unnecessarily slow down or application. Those are things that we’ve got to think about.

    Paul: That’s some really good advice Johnathan. Thank you so much for coming on the show. That was a great introduction to Air. Hopefully it’s encouraged a lot of people listening to the show to go out there and give it a go. Thanks for coming on and talk to you again soon.

    Johnathan: Awesome. Thank you very much.

    Thanks to Aaron Cooper for transcribing this interview.

    Back to top

    Listeners feedback:

    Getting a feel for accessibility

    Our first contribution is from Kenneth and is about accessibility:

    I listen to your podcast all the time and am working hard to become a very good web designer. My question for you is about accessibility, I hear a lot of people talking about it but not a lot of web designers are working hard on it to create sites that disabled people can use. I want to be a person who builds accessible sites that really work. How would someone know if their site is really accessible? How can you feel what disabled people are feeling when they visit your site? Could you talk about the different tools that disabled people use to go online so that we can use those tools and try to understand how they feel.

    Okay. Let’s start by clearing up a minor point. Validation is not directly related to accessibility. Having a site that validates does not make it accessible. Equally, a site that does not validate is not necessarily inaccessible. Admittedly a site that validates is more likely to be accessible, but that is all. It is great you validate your code and you should continue to do so. However, it is okay if your site does not always validate. There are good reasons why Boagworld does not and I am sure the same is true for Clear:Left.

    Let’s turn our attention to the heart of the question; how can you better understand the experiences of disabled users? It is an admirable aim but one that ultimately is impossible to achieve. There are so many different types of disability that you cannot associate with them all. That said, I can make a few suggestions which might help.

    A good place to start is by trying out a screen reader. Increasingly screen readers are bundled with operating systems. Recent versions of Microsoft Windows come with a basic Narrator, while the Mac OS includes a more feature-rich screen reader called VoiceOver. However, the most widely used screen readers are the separate commercial products like JAWS for windows. This is probably a good place to start as JAWS offers a free trial version for you to experiment with.

    However, be warned. When you first use a screen reader it is an intimidating experience. They take a lot of getting used to and can leave you with the impression that a blind person will never be able to use the internet. An alternative would be to watch a demonstration of a screen reader in action. Ian Lloyd did an excellent demonstration for Boagworld a while ago.

    Of course not all visually impaired users are blind. Some use screen magnifiers which enlarge screen content. Again, most operating systems have this functionality built in so you can easily try this for yourself. However, there are also a number of commercial products you can try out too.

    The other form of visual impairment worth investigating is colour blindness. Although not as serious, it is far more common and affects a large number of users. There are a couple of tools which will give you an idea of what a colour blind person is seeing. The first is Colorblind Web Page Filter which allows you to enter a url and see what that page would look like to a colour blind user. The second is Sim Daltonism, a colour blindness simulator for the Mac OS. Both will help you better understand what the web is like for colour blind users.

    The final little tip I want to share with you is kind of stupid but does sort of work. I do a lot of design for the elderly and they often suffer from a mixture of visual problems and motor issues (like arthritis). In order to better understand their experience I have bought a pair to ski gloves and some reading glasses (I don’t need reading glasses). Every now and again, I surf the site I am designing wearing both the glasses and gloves. The glasses make the screen hard to read while the gloves hamper my use of the mouse and the keyboard. There is nothing more frustrating than trying to select something from a drop down menu wearing ski gloves!

    Turning problems upside down

    Our second listener contribution for today is not a question but a tip. It comes from Jeremy and he writes:

    I can’t remember the name of the book off the top of my head (Getting Things Done?) that you’ve been recommending, but you mentioning it reminded me of a problem solving method that I learned a few years back that I thought you might enjoy. It’s called turning the problem upside down. It sounds stupid, but honestly it works pretty well.

    The principle behind it is if you can’t figure out a solution to a problem or are having trouble coming up with different ideas, you turn the problem upside down, or invert it, and then come up with solutions for the backwards problem. For some reason it’s much easier to think of the backwards solutions. Then you flip them back to normal and there are your solutions. Sounds confusing, so here’s an example:

    Problem: You want to increase traffic to your website

    Turn the problem upside down: You want to decrease traffic to your website

    Some ‘off the top of my head’ Solutions:

    • Make the site unfriendly
    • Randomly shut it off
    • Never update anything
    • Be rude
    • Keep key content hidden or difficult to find

    Now let’s flip the solutions back again and see if they solve the original problem:

    • Make the site more warm/friendly
    • Make sure it stays up reliably
    • Be good about frequently updating content
    • Be aware how of my copy and if I’m talking down to my visitors
    • Make sure the good content is easy to find and prominent

    What a great little tip! Excellent when you are suffering from creative block. I love it when you guys send in suggestions rather than questions. I know from the forum that the boagworld audience is hugely experienced and its great when you share that experience. Keep them coming!

    129. Conferences

    Posted in Classic shows on by Paul Boag

    This week’s show sees the return of Ryan and Stanton, holding the fort while Paul and Marcus sun themselves on holiday. .

    We’ll be talking about taking your first steps into the world of conferences and answering your questions about font smoothing and browser emulators

    Download this show.

    Launch our podcast player

    News and events

    Release of Firefox 3.1 Alpha

    Last Wednesday saw a new developer release from the Firefox team. Firefox 3.1 Alpha, or “Shiretoko” is now available for download. Shiretoko is built on a pre-release version of the Gecko 1.9.1 platform and introduces several new features for you to play with.

    • Web standards improvements in the Gecko layout engine
      • They don’t actually say what improvements, so I guess we’ll have to trust them with this one but from what i can gather, they’ve added a lot more CSS3 selectors like :nth-child, the CSS3 “word-wrap” property, CSS3 columns, text-shadow, box-shadow, border-image and more.
    • Text APIfor the <canvas> element.
      • This is a quite detailed API for drawing vector text within the canvas element, and is sure to set the hearts ot typophiles beating just a little bit faster.
    • Support for using border images.
      • The design community has been screaming for this for as long as I can remember, the ability to specify images as borders. The whole rounded-corner craze might be slightly out-of-style now, but I’m sure we’ll see some innovation with this feature very soon.
    • Support for JavaScript query selectors.
      • Now I’m not completely down with the javaScript kids, so I apologise if i don’t get this quite right. But the query selectors seem to be a way to target specific selectors instead of having to filter a result set provided by the getElementsByTagName() call, you can now do the filtering before you execute the query.
    • Several improvements to the Smart Location Bar.
      • When you start typing a URL, Firefox starts giving you options to choose from, you can now filter those results while you’re typing.
    • A new tab switching behaviour.
      • Pressing Ctrl+Tab now gives you a filmstrip style overlay which lets you quickly navigate to your open tabs, and mimics the similar feature in most operating systems nowadays.

    The alpha is available from the Mozilla Developer Center.

    A List Aparts’ 2008 Survey

    It’s that time of year again, the A List Apart team have unleashed their 2008 survey “for the people who make websites”. The survey gathers a massive amount of information, with around 33,000 people taking part last year and covers a wide range of questions covering all aspects of our beloved industry.

    The survey covers everything from Age, Gender and Geography to Education, Employment, Vacation (holidays to the rest of us) and those oh-so-important salary details, how many hours worked and your methods of staying upto date with what’s happening in the industry. The data gathered is compiled into a comprehensive, yet easy to read report, and they also provide the raw (anonymous) data so you can do your own number crunching if you so wish.

    You can also have a look at the 2007 survey results if you wish, and Paul and Marcus will no doubt be covering the results of this years survey when they’re published. So this is a call to arms really, help improve this survey by taking part at Alistapart.com. We took part, so should you!

    The Future of Web Font Embedding

    The last news item is a blog post by Richard Rutter on the future of web font embedding. With both Safari and Firefox supporting web fonts in their 3.1 releases, and development releases of Opera, it could be time to start playing with web fonts.

    Richard starts by defining web fonts as using the @font-face rule to point to regular TrueType or OpenType font files on a web server, this is to clear up any confusion with Internet Explorer’s proprietary web font support with uses EOT font file, which is also a way to wrap the fonts in DRM, which i think might severely hamper any efforts to bring web fonts into the mainstream.

    The font foundries and type designers seem to view web fonts as the death of their industry, insisting that their revenue streams will be destroyed by piracy and free font embedding, rather than seeing this as an opportunity to really boost their industry.

    There’s nothing to say that the @font-face rule has to point to a locally hosted font file, The opportunity exists for the font providers to host the fonts themselves, and charge for their useage. This saves us, as designers, from having to install fonts on the machines we design on, and will undoubtedly allow us to choose from a much larger selection of fonts which can be switched quickly and easily.

    Back to top

    Feature: A Year on the Conference Circuit

    This week’s feature has stemmed from a listener who asked “which conference would I suggest for a first timer”? And “how difficult is it if you don’t actually know anyone there”? Having attended a couple of the big conferences this year I thought it would be useful to share my experiences.

    Back to top

    Listeners feedback:

    Font Smoothing

    Steve Writes: I have been listening to your podcast. I really like it.

    I jusr want to ask a question. On mac, the fonts seem to be all thicker than windows. What setting are u using? I’ve been using best for lcd. Today I changed to automatic, and the fonts were much thinner. It looks more alike with windows fonts.

    Do you think this is a big problem for mac users? Since the fonts will look different. Which setting do you think is the best for web designer on macs?

    The difference of Mac fonts compared to their Windows counterparts originates from Apple’s legacy in desktop publishing and graphic design, the fonts are rendered in a way which would give a closer approximation to how they would look when printed.

    Mac’s use a specific font wrapper called dfont, this contains extra information to preserve certain features like font outlines and hinting which can then be rendered more accurately on-screen meaning that in general, fonts look better on a Mac, whichever smoothing method you choose.

    If you’re a designer, I’d heavily recommend testing your design in as many different browsers as possible, but also on different operating systems as well. I work primarily on Windows Vista (don’t shoot me) and have a dualscreen setup, my second screen can be flipped over to my Mac where I can test in Safari, Firefox and Opera on Mac, I also run a Ubuntu system to test in. Rather than running a standalone IE6 build on vista, I run a full XP virtual machine with IE6 running natively as I just don’t trust the standalone builds.

    One of the main things you’ll have to accept is that your design might not look identical on any combination of browser or operating system, and because you’re probably designing websites to be viewed by other people, I’d recommend keeping your font smoothing to the default setting of “automatic” which is most likely going to be the case for your target audience.

    Browser Emulators

    Andy Asks: Hey guys. Been listening (on and off) for a while now and love the show.

    I was wondering if there is such a thing as a browser emulator, software that allows you to see your site as it would appear on IE, Firefox, Safari, Opera, etc. If there is one, is it total crap and not really work.

    The answer to your question is yes, there are several websites that can provide you with this type of service.

    One of the more popular sites is Litmus which is an online emulator that validates your HTML and CSS as well as presenting you with a screenshot of your website loaded in up to 23 different browsers across various operating systems. It can also provide you with a report of any compatibility issues it has come across. However there is a fee to get any real use out of this service.

    What Litmus does it actually does very well; however there are a couple of major draw backs I’ve found:

    • You can’t have an interactive experience – Not all issues can be seen from a screenshot and more often than not you need to just take your mouse and navigate around the site to find problems.
    • You can’t test javaScript – You can’t see javaScript animations from a screenshot.

    As Paul said in the previous question, there’s no substitution for the real thing, which is having multiple setups with multiple browsers installed. However that’s not always a viable option especially for freelancers working from home who don’t have the budget (and space…) to have several machines and licenses for operating systems needed for testing, in which case sites like Litmus are invaluable.

    My advice is if you can test on the real thing, do, if you can’t then take a look at Litmus.

    Back to top

    An interview with Freelancer Magazine

    Posted in News on by Paul Boag

    I have just finished an interview for Alex Stubbs over at freelancermagazine.com. Being a clever cookie he massaged by ego and convinced me to take part even though I am on a family holiday in Scotland.

    I hadn’t come across Freelancer Magazine before, but it certainly looks like a superb site. If you are a web design freelancer or are considering making the swap then definitely check it out. It has great features, useful resources and of course star studded interviews!

    But before you disappear over to their site take a look at the interview.

    Thank you, Paul, for taking the time to speak with us.

    Absolutely!

    So how are you enjoying your vacation in Scotland?

    Scotland is one of the most majestic places in the world. At least if it isn’t raining. I have found it incredibly inspiring being out of the office and away from the web. I have achieved so much more here because I am free from distractions.

    Getting to the meat of our discussion is your weekly podcast on Web Design, which is to date the longest running and most popular web design podcast.

    I believe you started this in 2005 and it has been gaining more and more recognition since. How do you feel this medium has served you and your web presence over the years?

    I was very fortunate to stumble into podcasting. I started out blogging but found that hard work. I love writing but find it much harder to express my enthusiasm and excitement for a subject. Podcasting was a natural fit for my personality.

    I doubt you would not be interviewing me if it wasn’t for the show. It has done a huge amount for my personal profile and that of my web design company Headscape. It is also what has enabled me to write the Website Owners Manual too. I doubt any of that would have happened if I had just stuck to blogging. There are simply too many blogs around. You need a way to stand out from the crowd and in my case that was through podcasting.

    Any future plans for video podcasting?

    I have thought long and hard about video podcasting and yet I do not have an answer for you. On one hand video podcasting is hugely popular and an enormous growth area. It would also enable me to show code and designs. This is something that constantly frustrates me about audio podcasts.

    However, on the other hand I am aware that many people listen to my show while walking the dog or commuting to work. You cannot watch a video podcast in such circumstances. Video demands your attention in a way audio does not.

    Probably at the end of the day it will come down to return on investment. Doing a full blown video podcast is a lot of work. Unless we can make it pay for itself I doubt it will happen. For now people will have to be satisfied with the audio show and the live ‘behind the scenes’ video stream.

    You also have a new project in the works which has gone live recently on boagworld.com: “The Website Owners Manual.“ Which from what I’ve read seams to be an evolving manual for anyone interested in running a successful website (from start to finish)….

    I am really excited about the Website Owners Manual for a couple of reasons. First, there are so few books aimed at website owners or managers. They are all aimed at designers and developers. However, the client is key to the success of a project and there are certain things they need to know. Second, I am excited by the way this book is being produced. Instead of simply being published, this book is evolving through social participation. You can get access to chapters right now and have the opportunity to comment on and contribute to those chapters. I collect your feedback and adjust what I am writing accordingly. At the end of the process you get the final product. Its publishing 2.0… or something like that .

    Sounds very progressive! Here at FM the bulk of readers seem to be beginning freelancers who themselves will need to know a bit of knowledge you’ve outlined in this manual… what points do you think this book would be most important to our readers?

    I think the main thing will be how to better communicate with clients. The problem with most people who choose to start freelancing is that they under estimate the challenges of dealing with clients. You might be the best designer or developer in the world, but if you cannot deal with clients effectively you will fail. The website owner manual shows you what clients need to know and demonstrates ways of presenting that information to them.

    So you’re the Creative Director at Headscape, you run a weekly podcast, you speak at numerous web design and marketing conferences, and still find the time to write a book. I think even David Allen himself would be proud… whats your productivity secret? Whats your daily life like?

    I am a huge fan of David Allen and follow the Getting Things Done methodology closely. However being organized is only half the battle. The other half is recognizing what you are good at and sticking to that. I know I am an ideas person. I am great at starting stuff and terrible at finishing it. I therefore surround myself with people who are good at following through.

    At Headscape I have three fellow directors who are expert at managing me to be at my most effective. They bring me in for short bursts of activity when a load of ideas are required and then quietly push me to the sidelines when the REAL work begins.

    With the podcast, I rely heavily on the community to make it happen. There are people who transcribe the interviews, moderate the forums and even produce the show. There is Paul Stanton who helps me source news stories. Ryan Taylor produces the show by organizing guests, writing show notes and much more. Finally there is Anna Debenham who is our technician. She edits interviews, manages the site and handles the RSS feed.

    These people all give up there time because they love the show. That makes me feel very honoured. I would be lost without them and feel guilty that they don’t get more out of it.

    You started out as a Web Designer and evolved into other areas since, I’m guessing mostly due to your success with your podcast. How was your early experience when starting out as a Web Designer?

    I started out designing for the web back in 1994. I was working for IBM producing CD-ROMs for the first generation of multimedia PCs. While doing this IBM decided to start taking the web seriously and so I got involved very early on.

    I was just a junior designer which was why I was given the web stuff. It just wasn’t important back then. My career ended up growing in line with the growth of the web. As the web became higher profile so did my job until eventually I ended up working as a creative director at a dot com company in the late nineties.

    Basically, I just lucked out. A lot of success is luck. The idea that successful people are in someway more talented or better is just not true. It is about being in the right place at the right time. That and having a big mouth and being willing to shout about how good you are!

    What advice do you have for those looking into starting out as a Web Designer themselves?

    Wow that is a hard one. Its very different starting out today compared to my experience. That said, here is my gut reaction.

    First, know the basics. Focus on HTML, CSS and Javascript before anything else. Don’t get distracted by the latest fad or the more exciting trend. These are the fundamental tools you will always need.

    Next, find talented people you admire and get alongside them. Don’t be shy in approaching them. In my experience they love the attention!Follow their work, ask questions and look at who they follow and admire.

    Finally, get involved in the web design community. Go to meetups, conferences and other events. You will learn so much from your peers. Far more t
    han from a book
    or university course.

    Lessons from the O2 failure

    Posted in User experience on by Paul Boag

    I don’t want to start ranting about the debacle that was upgrading via the O2 website, from my iphone to the iphone 3G. However, there are a couple of things we can learn about good site design from their mistakes.

    Like most of the British population (or so it seemed) I tried to upgrade my first generation iphone for the new iphone 3G. Following the instructions I received from 02 I went to their website and then spent the next 2 hours battling to place my order. This horrendous experience raises some interesting points.

    • Load test - If you are expecting shit loads of people to hit your site at the same time then run some loading testing against it!
    • Don’t cause a panic – Announcing there is limited stock and that you are going to sell on a first-come-first-served basis is going to cause a rush.
    • Provide alternatives – Don’t force users into only purchasing through a website. Allow them to purchase via phone or store too.
    • Keep it simple – The whole process could have been streamlined. Adding a text message as a method of authentication was unnecessarily complicated and caused problems.
    • Avoid AJAX – On a site that is going to be hit by heavy traffic, avoid using unnecessary AJAX. It was impossible to jump to the appropriate place in the process. Instead I was forced me to start from scratch each time the page hung.
    • Use cookies – By using cookies they could have saved me considerable time entering my information again and again.
    • Clear messaging – Despite completing the process I am unsure of whether I have an iphone coming or not. The site needed to make it clear whether an order had been successfully placed.
    • Error handling – When things went wrong with the site it didn’t respond elegantly. Some carefully written messages could have cleared up a lot of confusion.
    • Better labels – One label asked me if I wanted a bolt on package. It didn’t explain what that package was or what answer was required. It just gave me a blank text box. What was I supposed to type into it? Should I leave it blank? Why was it a text box and not a dropdown menu? Was this the reason my submission was failing?
    • Email confirmation – It would have been nice to receive an email confirming or rejecting my order.
    • Waiting list – For those who failed to place an order before the product ‘sold out’ there should be an alternative. Never turn a customer away. Either offer the chance to pre-order with an estimated delivery date or at give the change to register to be informed when new stock arrives.

    Update: Alex made some excellent additional points in the comments and I wanted to mention them here too. He added to my already extensive list:

    • Get a CDN or virtual servers – If you’re expecting a lot of traffic in a short time, look to share the load. Think about placing your critical functions (such as an online shop) onto a platform that allows you to deploy additional servers on demand (often called Virtual Private Servers) – such as Amazon S3 or similar. If you can’t change onto something like that – you can still help your server by moving images, CSS and javascript onto another server, or even a CDN. A Content Delivery Network (CDN) is a network of servers that contain copy of your key files to help spread the load.
    • Have a backup plan (or have two!) -
      If you have something really high-profile, have a backup plan, or two! In this case, O2 DID have a back-up plan… they had a ‘failover’ site… which was a simple one-page form to take down customers details. The only problem was it didn’t work when it needed too… it failed too!
    • Brief your call centre -
      Knowing that some customers were likely to experience trouble accessing the site (or even just getting confused placing an order), you should make sure that you brief your call centre staff – put on extra staff and make sure that they can take orders too, and know what to do.
      When I called O2′s customer services, they couldn’t offer any help as ‘upgrades were online only’. Additionally they couldn’t check if my 3 times I put my credit card details in were registered (they weren’t as it happens).
      If all goes wrong… the call centre is your last line of defense, and O2 dropped the ball here too.

    Update 2: Well, the iPhone 3G has now launched in the UK and O2s website continues to fail users. This time Apple was forced to turn away customers from their stores because they were unable to register them with the O2 site. The reason why: The O2 website would only work in Internet Explorer. This provides us with yet another lesson to learn…

    • Build for your audience – Consider who your target audience is and what requirements they have. In particular consider their accessibility need to make sure you never turn away people wanting to give you money.

    All in all it was badly handled and I am pissed off. Can you tell!

    124. HTML 5

    Posted in Classic shows on by Paul Boag

    In this weeks show we explore how to create better online surveys and Lachlan Hunt joins us to discuss HTML5

    Download this show.

    Launch our podcast player

    Watch the behind the scenes video (Part 1)

    Watch the behind the scenes video (Part 2)

    News and events

    Removing Microformats

    The story that has generated the most email this week is the BBC announcement that they will be dropping the hCalendar Microformat. This decisions comes because of long standing accessibility concerns over the machine readable content within that particular Microformat. The problem is that code meant to be used programatically is potentially read out to screen reader users and displayed as meaningless tooltips to sighted users.

    The decision of the BBC to adopt Microformats was a huge boost to the movement. Equally the rejection the hCalendar is a blow. However, it is important not to get this out of proportion. Remember, they are only rejecting a single Microformat not the whole approach.

    The other thing to consider is that the BBC is a public service organisation with an incredibly high obligation to ensure maximum accessibility. In many ways they are in a unique position. Although it maybe appropriate for your organisation to pull hCalendars too, it should not be based on the decision of the BBC.

    My advice is as follows. If you already have hCalendar information on your site I would probably leave it (dependant on your exact circumstances). The Microformat community is working on a solution and I would implement that rather than removing hCalendar entirely. If however, you are not yet using hCalendar then I suggest you hold off until an updated specification is released.

    Becoming employable

    In the past we have spoken about becoming a professional web designer. I know that many people who listen to this show or read the blog are students. You are concerned that the skills you are being taught are out of date and will not improve your employment prospects. How then do you become a more employable web designer? What skills do you actually require?

    Andy Rutledge tackles this subject in his post "the employable web designer". Without a doubt it is the best post I have read on the subject of web design career development. I highly recommend you read it.

    The thing that impresses me is that it looks beyond the obvious design and technical skills required to be a web designer. It also tackles the business and communication skills too. He really drives home quite how wide an understand a good web designer has to have.

    My only criticism is that it could feel demoralising. You may read the list and think it is an unachievable aim. However, I don’t think that is the case. What Andy outlines is the optimal requirement of a web designer, rather than what is needed to get your first step on the ladder. I certainly did not have all of the attributes listed when I started.

    All we need now is a second post telling us how to gain the skills he lists.

    Better CSS font stacks

    David (a boagworld listener) sent in the next story. It covers a subject that I am currently still grappling with. It is a post about CSS font stacks.

    If you code in CSS you already know about font stacks. It is where you specify the fonts you wish to use. You can say for instance; use Helvetica and if that isn’t available use Arial. If that fails use a generic san-serif font.

    For many of us that is as far as our thinking goes. The majority of us use very basic font stacks that are uninspiring to the point of being insipid.

    I love this post because it lays out a very clear methodology for improving your font stacks. It also goes on to provide an impressive selection of font stacks organised into heading and body fonts, allowing you to instantly improve your site

    If your site is looking tired and boring, but you don’t have the time to redesign, consider adding a new font stack. Such a simple change could make a real difference.

    Do flexible layouts still matter?

    Our last story of the day is a post from Smashing Magazine entitled Flexible Layouts: Challenge For The Future. To be honest I was ensure whether to include this post or not. On one hand it covers an issue many people have been asking me about. On the other, its arguments seem stretched and the whole thing ends with an advert for a CSS framework.

    The article tackles zooming and fluid design. The new generation of web browsers – Firefox 3, Opera 9.5 and Internet Explorer 7 – provide full screen zooming. This gives users has the ability to enlarge the whole interface, not just text. Some are arguing that this is the end of fluid layout because zooming tackles many of the accessibility concerns associated with fixed width sites. However, this article strongly disagrees.

    The author argues that flexible designs are better for mobile devices, that pixels are becoming less important and that the user shouldn’t be required to customise a site to their needs (it should be done automatically). Although his arguments are weak at times and he uses some fairly dodgy comparisons I do generally agree with him. I see no reason to think fluid design will go away anytime soon.

    That said, I am in no doubt that page zoom does reduce the number of occasions fluid sites are necessary. Ultimately there is no right or wrong answer. It is entirely based on the situation. For example Boagworld, Headscape and The Website Owners Manual all use fixed designs. However, many of my client websites do not. That decision is based on numerous factors such as device, user base and business priorities.

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    Feature: Creating a Better Survey

    The web allows us to interact with our customers more than any other medium. One of the tools in our arsenal is the online survey. However, these are often badly implemented. In this weeks feature we find out how we make your surveys more effective?

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    Interview: Lachlan Hunt on HTML 5

    Paul: Joining me today is Lachlan Hunt; It’s good to have you on the show

    Lachlan: Thank You Very much

    Paul: It’s great to have you here I really appreciate you taking the time to join us, now the reason that we asked Lachlan on the show is because he posted a brilliant article on the A List Apart site about the subject of HTML 5 and I have been keen to look at this subject for a while partly because of my own ignorance to be honest, um, so lets kinda kick off by if you could perhaps tell us a little bit about where HTML 5 is at the moment I know that kinda getting a language to a release like this finalized is a massive process so can you tell us where we are at in that process.

    Lachlan: OK, it’s, um, a really an ongoing process with browsers implementing different parts of it progressively so it’s not, you know, going to be all implemented at once and ready to go in one, er the next few browser implementations. We have some features implemented already and shipping in browsers other features which are being worked on at the moment and other are planned for, but still a few years of yet. But it is gradually getting there. We are trying to focus on what authors really need, instead of trying to do it all at once

    Paul:Ahh, okay so that a slightly different approach that we have seen in the past, the idea of an incremental roll out. So how does that work from the W3C’s point of view are they doing modular releases is that how it works

    Lachlan: Um, at the moment no, but the way the spec is structured each part of the spec, what I am trying to indicate is the stability of each section of the spec as we go along. SO thing like the Canvas API which has been in browsers for a few years now, it should be getting to IE very soon. That section is pretty stable, Other things for example "data grid" or a lot of the web forms are not widely implemented.

    Paul: OK so that quite an interesting approach to the problem I guess from what you were saying earlier to me there is a community base element people can get involved and contribute. How is that all working then?

    Lachlan: Well we’ve got a REALLY REALLY open mailing list on whatwg.org anyone can subscribe at the moment there wa about 800 subscribers on that list anyone is free to subscribe and post feedback about the spec if they want to, but that’s not for everyone obviously because it’s quite a high volume mailing list and not everyone can keep up with that. We have also got an open blog on http://blog.whatwg.org/ where absolute anyone who wants to can write an article submit it and have it published. Anything to do with what the WHATWG are about, HTML5 and anything related to it at all. It’s also a good way to let the community know what’s going on by publishing articles also to find out what people think because they keep posting comments on there as well. We have also got an open forum which is at http://forums.whatwg.org/ again anyone can subscribe to that, am sue you know how a forum works

    Paul: So there are lots of different ways to be involved, I have to confess things like that can feel quite intimidating to get involved in. You’re kinda worried about putting your foot in it, and saying something really dumb, is there kind of Opportunities to lurk and are people fairly friendly over there? I guess you are going to say yes aren’t you

    Lachlan: Yeah everyone is friendly over there,they are nice sort of area to go to aim at web developers and people who aren’t quite as technical with the spec areas and stuff. You can ask any question you want and just learn whatever you want as well. Their is also the w3c side of it as well. Which is strictly related but is more focused on the actual technical side and issues so yeah. The What WG and the W3C are both publishing exactly the same spec and they both work on it together and feedback can be sent to either place, it will all be taken into account

    Paul: Oooh, that’s useful. So looking at kinda the state of affairs at the moment with HTML 5, reading through your article there was some things in there that really sounded quite exciting, there was this thing about structure and some kind of additional elements that could be used, which provide a little bit more structure, headers and footers and things like that can you tell us a little about that, and maybe explain a bit of what those do.

    Lachlan: Well at the beginning of the work back in 2004 / 2005 we basically took a look at what a lot of site where doing and we noticed that they were all using a similar structure. All the blog’s were using headers and footer and generally things like column layouts to show articles and stuff like that. So we wanted some semantic elements to come and cover each of those features that people actually used, solving the real problems that they were actually focusing on. instead of having to do "Div" elements for everything, which is what people do we give them an actual element and that also has a side effect of increasing accessibility because an element with specific semantics can be hooked into the accessibility API’s and help someone with assistive technology navigate the document a bit easier.

    Paul: Okay, because I mean reaction just glancing at it quickly and not thinking about it was what’s wrong with the div with an ID Equals footer, or an ID equal header or whatever but like you say, as you think about it more it become obvious that if those are considered distant elements, one person might call it a footer another might call it "the bottom" or whatever else if they have consistent semantic names then you know you can have screen readers and stuff jumping to the footer or avoiding / not reading the footer depending on what is set in their preferences, is that what you are thinking?

    Lachlan: Yeah that sort of it, it’s also helping the authoring side too, as there are lots of Div elements in source code which makes it easier to read if you have got elements with different names

    Paul: yeah very much so, I spend half my life trying to which closing Div relates to which elements, that very exciting. Obviously the other big area you talk about in your A List Apart article is the audio visual elements and there is a lot that’s happening in there. It’s always had the vague feeling that HTML has never had any kind of, erm, erm, the audio visual elements have always been and after thought, what happing in HTML 5 in regards to that?

    Lachlan: Well we have added the video and audio elements to the spec to try and allow video to be added directly to HTML, at the moment we have sites like youtube revel and all the other video site out there using flash to embed video and using the flash to give customized controls and stuff to the user, it’s really awkward, depending on proprietor technology, so we want to open that up a bit give a very very easy to use Javascript API to hook into and promote custom controls and all sorts of cool stuff with videos and of course audio as well. We have got experimental implementations of that in opera and in webkit. I have heard mozilla is considering implementing it as as it is now I am not sure of the status of their implementation. However the one big problem with video and audio at the moment is with Codecs, there are a whole load of software patent issues going around and we are not quite sure what codec we are going to standardize upon or if we are going o be able to get common codec support among the browsers, That’s an open issue but I am no lawyer to I cannot really go into that, so the ultimate aim is that you will be able to embed your movie file, your avid file or whatever directly into the HTML without the need to kinda pump it through something like flash

    Paul: cool

    Lachlan: that make it a whole lot easier to the authors hopefully

    Paul: Yeah, you kind of, to some extent got to ask the question why do we need that when we have got a solution like flash

    Lachlan: Well because Flash is a proprietary technology it’s managed only buy Adobe , they control it, they control the changes and what does and what does not go into future versions of it, however the thing with HTML is that it is an open standard platform which can be implemented by anyone and maintain interoperability between those venders.

    Paul: It’s intrusting isn’t it that adobe has just announced they are opening up the flash format, do you wonder if that’s a reaction to some of the stuff you have been doing to kind of force their hand if they want to stay ahead o the game and dominant they need to be open

    Lachlan: Yeah I don’t know how that going to work though, it depends, if they open the format up and actually make it an open development process where anyone can contribute to the future version and features which go into it or whether they just write the specs and tell other people to implement based on what they write, so I don’t know much about that. It will be interesting to see how it goes.

    Paul: Very interesting, Now the next thing you cover in the A List Apart article is something which you titled "Document Representation" now I have to confess this confused me, so do you want to explain a little about what you meant by document representation. What you were getting at there.

    Lachlan: Yeah, well in the past we have had HTM, and XHTML with two separate specs, HTML 4.1 which a lot of people use and XHTML 1.0 which a whole lot of other people use one of them is based on XML and is really really strict syntax that requires well formedness and is supposed to when you serve it correctly, if you make a well formedness error the browser is suppose to stop processing and throw and error message saying "Sorry I cannot handle this" where as HTML is more sorta loose and convenient in its error handling, it’s the traditional inspired by SGML, although really only syntactically similar these day but the error handling is a bit more lenient and you can get away with making a lot more errors. So instead of having two distinct language which you can use we have combined them into a single language which share the same elements and attributes and everything and as much a possible and when the browser reads those file it produces and internal representation called the DOM, a lot of javascript user will be familiar with the DOM as they work with that with their scripts to modify the document through the DOM. That’s an internal representation which is mapped, the DOM which is sort of mapped to by the syntax’s, the HTML and the XHTML syntax’s so it give the authors a choice of which syntax they want to use

    Paul: So why do we need that choice what is the key difference, I mean you talk about HTML being more lenient are there other reason for choosing one over the other.

    Lachlan: erm, well I don’t really know. However a lot of authors do prefer the strict syntax of XHTML like to make sure they quote the attributes and encode all their ampersands properly. They like to know they have done everything perfectly as with HTML a lot of people do make mistakes inadvertently and don’t want end users to see big error messages, so it’s a bit more user friendly if some little small error slips though their CMS and causes problems.

    Paul: So it’s basically come down to personal preference then

    Lachlan: yeah

    Paul: Okay, that’s fair enough, so both, we are going to see equal support for both of them in browser manufacturers are we

    Lachlan: Well that’s the hope we have said that we have got good support in most browsers, it’s just IE which is lagging behind

    Paul: (Sarcasm) Oh that’s a suprise (Laughs) Okay are there ant other things in HTML 5 that might be of interest to those listening to the show which we should be paying attention to?

    Lachlan: erm, well, as I said before we got canvas implemented in most browsers

    Paul: So tell us, what’s canvas

    Lachlan: It’s a 2D drawing API that you can use javascript to draw dynamic image with. People have used it to implement things like graphs that are built using tables of data which are on the page. People have also gone and done 3D games with it which is really cool

    Paul: Wow, that incredible. I mean that sounds very similar to SVG is it a different thing.

    Lachlan: It is different SVG is entirely done with XML, you modify that with script via the DOM by changing elements and attributes and stuff or with CSS. Canvas is an immediate mode graphics API where it is more like a bitmap sort of thing where as SVG is vector graphics, and canvas is bit map. They can both do images, the same sort of images, if you like but we have both vector images and bitmap images, so they both can serve different purposes.

    Paul: Right, I see. Okay that’s good, so okay the big question, kind of the final question everyone is going to have is when can they start doing some of the cool stuff. Now you said right at the beginning this is going to be modular support based thing so we are going to be able to see some of these elements before others. You know some parts before other, so what can we do now, what are we going to be able to do soon give us an idea of where things are at.

    Lachlan: erm, okay let’s see I think what’s being implemented at the moment. Cross document messaging is being implemented at the moment, that’s an API that lets you send message between documents with javascript without worrying about cross domain security issues,

    Paul: Oooo…. that’s good.

    Lachlan: Yeah it’s a really, really handy API that been implemented in opera for a while and I heard mozilla is implementing it soonish and should be in firefox 3 thought I am not entirely sure about that. That should be very very soon, erm, what else have we got, we got…. hmmm, this is tough

    Paul: Sorry put you on the spot there (laughs) is that last one supported in webkit?

    Lachlan: erm, I am not sure I would have to double cheek that

    Paul: Okay that’s fair enough

    Lachlan: yeah,

    Paul: Okay so any other elements? Things like the structural changes are any of those being supported yet?

    Lachlan: Not quite yet, erm as far as I know support for those requires changed to the phaser, and to implment the new pharsing algorithm in HTML 5, as far as I know browsers are not yet focusing on doing that because..

    Paul: Okay that’s a shame, because that one I liked the sound of, what about the audio and the visual stuff?

    Lachlan: We have experimental implementations in opera which supports OGG video, though it’s not really in a public build version yet, there is a experimental version which was released last year sometime. And webkit also has support in their nightly builds, which supports mpeg 4 unfortunate they don’t support the same codec but you can experiment with them.

    Paul: (laughs) That would be far to easy

    Lachlan: yes I know

    Paul: So it’s all progressing slowly but, erm you know obviously the one name which has been very absent in the list you keep mentioning is Internet Explorer, so I expect we can probably see some slower movement there. We are talking you know in the years before this all becomes mainstream and we can actually start using it. Is that a fair comment to make?

    Lachlan: Yes it will be several years before the entire spec is finished, we are hoping that it can get finished sooner rather than later but realistically it’s going to be quite a while yet, But it is important to know people will be able to use theses features before the spec is finished; so it depends on when browsers start supporting features authors can go ahead and use it.

    Paul: That’s great and real exciting that you can start to do that sort of stuff. you know that we don’t need to wait for it all to be set in stone before moving forward. And it’s always exciting as well to see the future, know what coming up and be aware of everything. so is there somewhere people can go a websites address and keep an eye on what is currently supported by browsers.

    Lachlan: Not at the moment but that’s something worth looking into, I think there is a wiki on the Working Group site, it does have some implementations listed but I am not sure how up to date. But it’s something I think we should look into

    Paul: Yeah it would be great to have some kind of single page which says what features are supported by each browser that you could check back every few months see what’s going, there you go there is my contribution to the working group (laughs). Alright it was really good to speak to you and thank you so much for your time, What we will do is to get you back in further down the line and have a check to see where we have currently got to in the development of HTML 5, Thank you so much for your time.

    Thanks to Jamie Knight for transcribing this interview.

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    Listeners feedback:

    Staying healthy on the web

    Evan writes: My question to you is not entirely related to design, development or management but rather about health in the web industry. This is very important but we often seem to forget about it. We spend hours upon hours at our desks but are unaware of the damage this could be having on our health. Eyeballs almost touching the screen, typing without a break, sitting incorrectly – just a few examples. So, what do you do to maintain good health while working?

    I am possibly the worst person in the world to answer this question. I consistently abuse my body while at work. In fact a physiotherapist friend said I had the worse posture in front of a computer she had ever encountered.

    However, there is possibly something to learn from my terrible example. Let’s look at what I do and compare that to best practice.

    • I sit with my leg tucked up under me – Posture while working is important. Both feet should be flat on the floor, rest your wrists on the desktop in front of your keyboard and make sure your monitor is at eye level (in other words avoid laptop screens).
    • I stoically refuse to use anything other than my preferred mouse and keyboard – Using the same keyboard and mouse in the same position day after day can cause damage. Try using a variety of different hardware and positions. Push your mouse and keyboard nearer or further from you to change the position of your arms.
    • I believe that an individual pixel should fill my field of view - Leaning too close to your monitor is a particular weakness of designers who want to position that pixel ‘just so’. This not only damages your eyes but also your back. When you learn forward your neck and back support the weight of your head. When sat upright, the head is supported by a straight spine and therefore your chair bears the weight.

    On the upside I do take regular breaks. I would like to claim this is because of my health. However, I think it has more to do with my short attention span. I get easily distracted and wander off to do something more interesting.

    From Photoshop to HTML

    I see a lot of PSD 2 HTML services on the internet but never tried any out. It seems to be an great option for an designer for making an quick website, to edit later myself.

    What is the opinion of you guys? Love to hear you discuss this topic in one the next podcasts.

    An long time listener from Holland.

    I have to confess to being a snob over these services. Until recently I have always doubted the quality of the code but after seeing some recent examples I have begun to change my mind.

    We are even considering giving them a try at Headscape, just to see what happens. Certainly from an economic point of view they make sense especially if you have more work than you can handle. That said, I do have three concerns.

    First, results may vary. Without a personal recommendation it could be hard to find a provider who can produce the quality you require. Anybody can convert a photoshop document into HTML. However, it is much harder to do so using techniques like microformats, semantic markup and accessibility. Also, just because the quality was good once, does not mean it will be so again. As the good providers get busy it can lead to a decline in quality.

    Second, people code in different ways. Unless careful attention is given to commenting, it is hard to pick up somebody elses markup. This is fine for relatively static sites where only small changes are required. However for projects where change happens regularly as the site evolves, it is more important that the markup is tailored to your style of coding.

    My final concern is that this could lead to designers not learning HTML. As I have said before on the show, I believe all designers should be able to code themselves. You need to understand how the web works and markup is apart of that. Also, if you cannot code how can you judge the quality of the markup you receive?

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    123. Plight

    Posted in Classic shows on by Paul Boag

    In this weeks show we review Textmate and the Top 5 Tips for Web Designers and we discuss the plight of in-house designers.

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    A quick request. We are really in need of some more transcribers to help with the interviews we do. 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 an email to Ryan our producer and he will add you to the list.

    News and events

    SPAM meltdown

    It is always with fear and trepidation that I mention HTML email. It inevitably leads to a torrent of comments ‘educating’ me about the evils of HTML in email, and that we should only use plain text.

    Although personally I wish HTML email was never invented and try to limit its use, I do accept it is here to stay. Despite its many drawbacks it is statistically more effective than plain text from a marketing perspective.

    You will be hard pushed to pursued a client to forgo HTML. Inevitably we will have to produce HTML templates occassionally. Of course, being conscientious, when we do produce HTML emails we want to ensure they look great and are well coded. This leads me to a couple of stories worth mentioning.

    The first is that Patrick McNeil (of Design Meltdown fame) has launched a new site called Spam Meltdown. The site showcases examples of great email design in much the same way as Design Meltdown does with websites. Patrick has done an amazing job on this site and he has my sympathy because he is subscribed to over 1000 mailing lists! The designs he showcases are organised by style, colour, industry and topic. As with design meltdown this categorisation approach works really well. You can quickly find inspiration by looking at categories that are relevant to your project.

    The second news item worth mentioning is that Campaign Monitor have updated their chart for CSS support in email clients. Campaign Monitor is a service which allows you to send HTML newsletters, but they do a lot more than just take your money. They are actively involved in improving standards support among email clients through the email standards project. Next time you are trying to produce an HTML email template check out their CSS support grid as it will clearly show you whether a particular CSS property is supported.

    Form Analytics

    While I am on the subject of cool services like Campaign Monitor, I also want to mention Clicktale. Clicktale is a service that allows you to track users as they move about your site and even anonymously record their actions. The last time I mentioned them this disturbed many people who saw it as an invasion of privacy. However, I see it as a valuable tool for learning about user interaction and improve site usability.

    If you share my view, then you maybe interested in a new service they are starting to offer. You can now not only track users as they click around your website, you can also watch how they interact with forms.

    In addition to video recording, the new form analytics service also provides three invaluable reports…

    • The time report – This shows how long users spent completing each field.
    • The blank report – This provides information on fields that have been left blank on submission.
    • The refill report – Which highlight fields that have been completed incorrectly.

    If you run a site that requires users to complete long or complex forms then you will see the benefit of this service. On a high trafficked ecommerce site this would be invaluable, substantially reducing the number of users dropping out at checkout.

    Art direction hits the blog

    This week has seen the launch of Jason Santa Maria’s new personal website. For those of you who do not know, Jason is the creative director at Happy Cog (Zeldman’s company).

    Normally, I would not mention the launch of a new personal website. However, Jason has done something very interesting. His new design is well executed but plain. It certainly is not as inspiring as his other work. The reason for this simple approach is that it is a framework upon which he will build.

    The idea is that each of his blog posts will have a custom design to accompany it. The design will therefore reflect the content. In effect he is bring art direction to his blog. This is a bold experiment and something that Zeldman has written about before.

    Although I am fully behind the idea of bringing content and design closer together, I do have some reservations. First, there is a possibility that the constantly changing design could make navigation around the site confusing. Fortunately from what I have seen so far that will not be the case. Jason has been careful to ensure key navigational elements remain in a consistent location and have similar styling wherever you are in the site. However, if other designers were to adopt this approach would they be so careful?

    My second concern is a purely practical one. If each article not only needs writing but also designing, will that reduce the amount Jason posts? In other words is a blog really the right place for this type of art direction?

    However, despite these reservations I am really pleased Jason is trying this approach. A personal website should be the place to experiment and try new things. Too many blogs (including my own) are cookie cutter solutions with some pretty graphics slapped on top. Its superb to see somebody doing something different.

    Prototyping

    My final news story of the week returns to a subject we have touched on recently. How do you wireframe a modern web application with its high level of interaction? In show 120 I mentioned that one approach might be to utilise flash. Today I want to point you at an article on the List Apart website, which suggests that building prototypes maybe better than struggling with wireframes.

    When I first saw this article I was hesitant. After all I can barely pursued my clients to pay for wireframes let alone a full blown prototype. However, the more I considered what was being suggest, the better the idea seemed.

    The majority of time spent getting an application working is spent on bug fixing, browser support and non-core functionality. The rough ‘outline’ of an application can come together very quickly. What is more, unlike wireframing, a prototype can be used as the basis for the final build. It does not get thrown away like a wireframe.

    The article also points out that prototypes are better for demonstrating difficult concepts to clients. They encourage earlier collaboration between designer and developer, and provide something substantially better to user test against.

    With almost every new website having some form of web application, we all need to consider how to better conceptualise their operation.

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    Feature: The plight of the in-house designer

    The more organisations I work with the more sympathy I have for in-house designers and developers. It is a role that can be thankless and isolating. How then can their lives be made that much easier? We discuss this in this weeks feature.

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    Reviews: Textmate and Top 5 Tips for Web Designers

    We have two reviews this week by our lucky competition winners Teifion Jordan and John McFarlane. Teifion and John will be going to this year’s dConstruct in Brighton.

    dConstruct is the affordable one day conference for people designing and building the latest generation of social web applications. Tickets cost £125 inc VAT and went on sale yesterday so be sure to check it out.

    Textmate by Teifion Jordan

    Hi, I am Teifion Jordan, I am reviewing a program created by someone far smarter than me. I am going to be looking at Textmate. Textmate is a Mac only application though there is a similar editor called eText Editor for Windows.

    First impressions of Textmate are that it’s pretty sparse, it looks like any other editor. I throw it a PHP file and it colours the text in, just like any other editor would. The colour scheme can be changed, both text and background colours can be altered, which is quite a neat touch. I can even make parts bold, italic and underlined which is a neat touch. It requires knowledge of Regular expressions but I can actually add in more rules for what to colour in! I used this to make variables used as array indexes appear differently, something I have wanted to do for some time. Not since I was a toddler, but definitely some time.

    But enough moaning about how the program itself is both smarter and better looking than me, I wanted to try some code. I found that if I typed "foreach" in a PHP block and hit tab, I was presented with an entire foreach loop. Closer inspection revealed that there were dozens of snippets and commands for PHP and dozens more for each of the many languages and some things that were not languages. With 5 minutes of effort I had setup Textmate to post my blog posts for me, I am now one step closer to not having to put any effort at all into blogging.

    It is possible to create your own snippets and not at all hard either. I now have one to tell me that I am beautiful and another to create a PostgreSQL query. I can also write new commands, I can write them in command line script, Python, Ruby and PHP to name a few. All of the commands are completely open sources, so you can see what’s already been done, and sort of plagiarise that sort of work for your own means. Except plagiarism is bad so don’t ever do it.

    I can edit columns, I can write new snippets, commands and even entire languages, I can Regex, I can manage projects with a hierarchal file structure. It’s like before I was walking but now I’m on a push bike. I can’t make use of the ability to run down pedestrians until I learn how to do balance and pedal. Okay, the running down pedestrians was a bad example but anybody that is still listening and not calling the police must have understood it so I’ll continue. There’s nothing I can’t do in Textmate, I just need to look at the extensive online manual to learn it. And there I think is it’s biggest failing.

    Textmate is a really lovely program to use but it’s so complicated. Coda, as a contrast, is a more intuitive application but it is to Textmate as a spade is to a chainsaw, that is, meant for a different problem and with fewer moving parts but also with the ability to digs holes? I’m sorry, my mind wandered. What I meant to say is that Textmate is great for dealing with code but not so much the design which is what apps such as Coda excel at. I’ve now been using Textmate for 10 months and I still think there is potential to unlock, though, that might be because I’m a thickie.

    I suppose I should wrap this up by saying that I would heartily recommend anybody thinking about writing lots of code to give TextMate a good look. It takes a lot of time to get a lot out of it, but there really is a lot to get out of it.

    Thank you very much for listening, I hope this was at least semi-informative

    Top 5 Tips for Web Designers by John McFarlane

    Hi, I’m John McFarlane and this is the first ever review brought to you live from my living room. Today I’m reviewing a post that has been submitted on the boagworld.com forum. The title is "Top 5 Tips for Web Designers". I’ve been reading through the replies and I’ve put together my top 5 top tips.

    In at number 5 submitted by richquick, allow time and money for personal development, read blogs, buy books, attend conferences, experiment and learn new techniques and technologies.

    In at number 4 posted by Jayphen, surround yourself with designers, whether they’re colleagues, real world contacts, online contacts, forums, podcasts. The more you talk about design the more you learn and I’d like to add to that e-mail designers for advice and let them know your experiences.

    In at number 3 posted by some guy called Paul Boag, develop with the latest best practices, ensure you separate content, design and behaviour. Make sure everything you build uses progressive enhancements.

    In at number 2 another one by Paul Boag, it’s an obvious one but one that can’t be put across more clearly, know HTML, CSS and javaScript inside out, you need to know the core technologies that underpin the web back to front. I’d like to add to this point, the basics of HTML and CSS are easily learnt but don’t be fooled into thinking that you know enough, you really need to know these subjects to an advanced level. This will benefit you when your implemented the latest best practices.

    And that brings me on to my number 1 tip and that is love your job, I think if you love this industry and have a passion for web design, I think those qualities will guide you to achieve your goals. So enjoy your development and don’t rush yourself too much. Take the time to develop the right way, build contacts and friends and embrace the industry as a whole.

    That about raps up this weeks review. I hope you’ve enjoyed the very first show live from my living room. Thank you and goodbye.

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    Listeners feedback:

    Newspaper columns on the web

    Adrian writes: Hey guys, long time listener from the states. I’ve been working on a new personal site lately and I’ve become fixated on the idea of using newspaper style columns. Since you two seem to know a thing or two usability, I’d figure I’d ask for your thoughts.

    It seems like most people view them as a print concept that doesn’t translate well online but seeing as most screens these days are widescreen and vertical space is taken up by menu bars, docks and browser extensions, going horizontal strikes me as a logical solution.

    I appreciate the logic. It is true that more computers than ever have widescreens and that vertical space is at a greater premium than horizontal. However, I would think very carefully before employing newspaper style columns. As I see it there are two concerns:

    The usability concern

    As you point out, people reference usability concerns as the primary reason against newspaper columns. In a newspaper, copy runs across several columns with the eye darting from the bottom of one column to the top of the next. This is acceptable because the user can view the entire newspaper in a single glance. There is no such thing as a scroll bar.

    On the web it is different. You are unable to predict the height available in a browser window and so users will almost certainly have to scroll. This means the user will scroll down one column as they read and then have to scroll back to the top to start the next column. This is far from a pleasurable reading experience.

    It is also important to consider width as well as height. As you say newspaper style columns works well on high resolution, widescreen monitors. On anything less the story becomes unreadable with narrow columns and short line lengths. The alternative is to allow both horizontal and vertical scrolling. But as I am sure you, know this is the ultimate usability error and should be avoided at all costs.

    The technical concern

    There are also technical considerations to take into account. How will a story be split over multiple columns? Currently this cannot be done in CSS, although this may appear in CSS3.

    One option would be to manually layout each block of text. However, this isn’t going to be practical with anything other than the most static of sites.

    The only option is to use some server side code. However, even this is not without its problems. Consideration needs to be given to inline elements such as images or quotations. What happens if they appear at the end of one column? Does a quote get split? Will the design accommodate larger images? What happens when text is scaled?

    Although all of these technical problems can be overcome, you are forced to ask whether it worth the effort. This is especially true considering the serious usability concerns.

    Estimating dev/creative work

    Kirk Henry asks: I’m not sure if this should be listed as a question or not but her goes. I’m a Creative Director for a dev shop with some very large fortune 500 companies and a problem I always seem to come across is difficulty in the estimating process. We use excel documents, have some standard hours for comps but have to do custom estimation for multi media projects etc… my estimates are always pretty decent but I want to know what you guys use or what software you would recommend. I have been listening on itunes from the start and love the show.

    Ok, this is probably the most important subject that we (and I mean the web community) don’t talk about. Why? I think, because it’s difficult to pin down a method of reliably estimating a project and, more so, we’re all guilty if underestimating time and again… these are my thoughts:

    The first thing to ask yourself is ‘how serious is this project?’ I have a sixth sense for requests for quotes that fit into the following brackets:

    • ‘We have this idea but have no idea how much it will cost and we want you to do all the research work involved in scoping it. Of course we won’t pay for the research and there’s no way we’ll pay sensible money for the work once we know what it is’
    • ‘We have a supplier that we want to work with but my boss says I need a couple of other quotes’
    • ‘Us guys in sales and marketing have been doing some blue sky thinking and want a quote to redevelop Google….’

    You get the idea – timewasters. You need to deal with these requests quickly – this is how I do it. Have a chat with whichever department(s) would do this work if it ever materialised – get them to give you wide ballpark figures. Add in PM and contingency and send them an email. 99 out of a 100 won’t even bother getting back to you. Some will, but they’re usually trying to get free scoping (‘can you give me a bit more detail on how you reached those figures’).

    Anyway, I’ve ranted long enough timewasters, back to Kirk’s question.

    First question – do you know the budget? If yes, then you are looking to fit a scope into a set amount of effort. Can you do it? Will the ‘client’ be happy with the scope that fits their budget? Do they understand what that scope is (especially if you have reduced it to fit their budget)? DO NOT get creative with your effort allocations just to fit within the budget. Either ask for more (up front) or walk away.

    If you don’t know the budget then you are looking to scope a project from scratch. If it’s a really big project then ideally you should be being paid to scope it as we’re looking at business analysis and consultancy here.

    Break down the project into rough task areas. It’s likely that you’ll have done other projects that include similar tasks so you’ll know efforts on these (though ask yourself if you got it right last time). For the ‘new’ tasks, break it down further and you will probably find other smaller tasks that you have done before. For the really new stuff then you need to talk to an expert (designer/developer/IA) and get them to think the task through. They will provide you with an informed guess. That’s right – guess. Because people are guessing it is really important to overestimate fixed price projects. This is the cost to the client of having a fixed price.

    Don’t forget to charge for meetings (if 3 people are attending then charge for 3 people!). Project management is notoriously undercharged. We have a rule of thumb of 15 – 20% (and that’s probably light).

    The golden rule of estimating is don’t be tempted to lower your probably already too low price just to win the work. Be prepared to walk away.

    As far as tools to help with estimating go, MS Project is great at separating tasks, linking resources to tasks and giving you a good idea of how long things will take. But, I tend to find that it is over the top at the quote stage and tend to stick with Excel.

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