Boagworld

Read ’10 ways to put content in front of more people’

Housekeeping: Facebook

Good news everybody! Boagworld now has a Facebook page. I know, its exciting isn’t it. Contain your enthusiasm, you are making a scene.

Seriously though, I wanted to let you all know because I am aware I spend most of my life refusing friends requests on Facebook. I made a decision early on to keep Facebook for personal friends rather than a promotional tool for Boagworld. I always hate refusing people and should have setup a page or group ages ago. Somehow I never got around to it.

Anyway, the Boagworld Facebook page now exists so make sure you take a minute to join it.

News

Google supports RDFa and Microformats

The big news of the week is Google’s announcement that they will now be supporting RDFa and Microformats.

Both RDFa and Microformats are methods of marking up information on a webpage in such a way that it can be understood by a machine. Google now understands four such types of embedded data. These are…

When Google discovers this type of data on your website it will enhance your search engine results to include the data.

An example Google search result including a review

Yahoo has offered support for embedded data for some time. However, Google’s market share gives a considerable boost to the Microformats community and is of massive interest to those interested in SEO.

However, before rushing to check if your embedded data appears in Google’s results, you should be warned that it almost certainly will not. According to Jeremy Keith Google has only implemented this feature on a small subset of sites. However, he goes on to say:

The list of approved sites will increase over time so if you’re already publishing structured contact and review information, let Google know about it.

Nevertheless this finally gives a solid business case to implement embedded data, which I have been advocating for some time.

Launching a new blog

I have often talked about the importance of running your own blog. I have explained how having a blog is an opportunity to share your expertise and is important in winning new business or advancing your career. However, in all that time I have not once given any advice about launching a blog. This is a definite omission on my part.

Of course one approach is to soft launch your blog. This gives you the opportunity to build a backlog of posts and find your voice. However, there are other occasions when you need to make a splash when you launch. If that is you I recommend reading 10 Ways to Launch a New Blog with a ‘Bang’.

This Web Designer Depot post provides some great advice that costs virtually nothing:

Prepare amazing content in advance
Run a viral twitter campaign
Guest post on other blogs
Interact with your user base

However, it also makes some suggestions for organisational blogs that have a budget for launch. These include:

Give away prizes
Host a launch party
Hold a contest

Of course many of these suggestions are just as applicable to those looking to breath new life into an existing blog. So if you have a blog, read this post.

The creative process

There is two posts that have emerged this week that offer two very different perspectives on the creative process. Both are worth reading if you are a designer.

The first is written by Keith Robinson over at Blue Flavor and is entitled Don’t Lose That Creative Thinking. At its most basic level this post is a rant. However, as rants go it is extremely thought provoking and inspiring.

In this post Keith rails against constraints and convention. He argues we are too often constrained by technology writing “Let’s let technolgoy work for us! Not the other way around” and that too often we choose to blindly accept conversational wisdom instead of thinking for ourselves. He writes:

What ever happened to creativity and opinionated thinking in design? Has science and data removed the artistic? What about trusting your instinct as a designer and making the way for future innovation. I can’t tell you how frustrating it is to sit back and watch people do the same thing over and over and then turn around and question someone who’s making a creative stand.

It is a definite call to arms and although somewhat extreme at time you cannot help but be inspired to create more and compromise less.

Talking of inspiration I also want to mention The Evolution of a Website Design by Mike Kus. The post tracks the evolution of the StackOverflow website that Mike has been designing over the last few days.

Stackoverflow website

The reason I mention this post is that it fascinating to see the process of another designer. What makes this even more interesting is the fact that Mike is relatively new to web design coming as he does from a print background. Seeing his process really brings home some of the points raised by Keith in his post. Mike seems unconstrained by technical considerations and web conventions. As a result the work he produces is both original and beautifully crafted.

Launch a business not a side project

We end today with another post from the guys at Carsonified. This one is from Ryan Carson and is titled “Launch A Business, Not a Side Project“. In the post Ryan shares his own experiences of launching web applications and provides a wake up call to those of us who have focused so heavily on getting an app out of the door that we have forgotten it requires business mechanisms to suppport it.

Notice that I refer to “us”. That is because most of what is written in this post mirrors our own experiences of launching Getsignoff. When we were building Getsignoff all we could think about was getting it launched. However, as Ryan points out in his post, this is only the beginning of the story. Even though I have warned clients against it many times before, I had the “build it and they will come” mentality.

Ryan focuses on 4 key areas that are often forgotten by web developers in the scramble to get an app live. These are:

Making time for marketing
Assigning recource to kick ass customer support
Spending money on advertising
Using A/B testing

As Ryan writes:

The majority of apps were built by small web design firms or freelancers who bought into the dream without really understanding how much time it takes to make an app succeed.

This is so true. It certainly was for us. Although we have great plans for Getsignoff, it has been a painful journey and you can bet that any future development will be backed by the business processes to make it a success.

Feature: 10 ways to put your content in front of more people

What is more important – driving traffic to your site or encouraging as many people as possible to see your content? Believe it or not, they are not one in the same thing. In this week’s feature Paul looks at 10 ways you can make sure your content is seen by as many people as possible.

Audible recommendation

This week I would like to recommend The Long Tail by Chris Anderson on Audible.com. The Long Tail is a superb book that I would recommend to anybody running a website especially if it is an ecommerce site. The book examines how the web has changed the value of information and commodities. It looks at the huge opportunities available to reach ever more niche markets and make money from the long tail.

Best of all if you sign up with Audible you can get this book totally free. Simply go to www.audiblepodcast.com/boagworld and claim your free credit.

If you want to listen to it, Audible has it! With over 60,000 titles and virtually every genre, you’ll find what you’re looking for. Get a free audiobook and 14-day trial today by signing up at www.audiblepodcast.com/boagworld.

Listeners feedback:

Bubble Timer Review

Hi Paul, hi Marcus and hello to the Boagworld listeners, my name is Emily and I am here to submit a review of a time-tracking application called Bubbletimer.

First of all I have to make a little apology for the sound in the background. I work from home and it turns out I live on quite a noisy street which I have to say I don’t really notice until I try and make a recording and then all sorts of weird sounds in the background, so please excuse the background noise.

So I’m submitting a review of Bubbletimer in response to show number 158 where Paul talks about the reality of home working which is also a blog post on the Boagworld website and it was actually the blog post which really inspired me to want to make a response, in particular a comment by XX who asked about how Paul tracks his time. I immediately wanted to make a response, which I did in the comments but I thought I’d share it here to share this fantastic time-tracking web application that I use. It’s called Bubbletimer and basically what it does is it tracks time in 15 minute increments by activity and then by day and it produces reports for your chosen time period, say a week.

There is a 15 minute time chime reminder which reminds you to track your time and forces you to consider what you’re doing and whether that is what you’re meant to be doing or whether that’s the most productive thing you could be doing.

There is also a mobile web interface which can be quite nice if you’ve got an iPhone, you can be online all the time. There are also multi-user capabilities in that you can share reports with others so if you’re working in a team you can see how much progress everyone else is making.

What it doesn’t do is; it doesn’t convert time to time slips, it doesn’t integrate with an invoicing application and it doesn’t recognise when you’re inactive or when you’ve changed tasks, as I know some time tracking applications can do.

So really it’s for self-employed people, freelancers or those working on fixed-price projects who want to track their progress on that project, or anyone who needs help motivating themselves in getting things done. It’s not for employees because of it not having time-sheets or integrating into a invoicing scheme, I’d say it’s not good if you’re self-employed or a freelancer working on an hourly basis.

What’s great about this application is that you can track your non-billable time and for me that’s been a real lifesaver. I am one half of a small web design partnership and I do lots of accounting, quoting, emailing and lots of tasks that are not specifically billable, or billable tasks that I’ve already quoted a set fee for, so with this I can measure the actual time spent against what I’ve quoted.

Of course you can also use it to track how much time you actually spend on ‘Social Networking’ every day, you know, see how long you actually spend on Twitter or commenting on blog posts. Another example of one of the tasks I’ve been tracking with it is my bookkeeping and it’s really been useful for me to see how much time I’ve spent on that and whether I ought to think about hiring a bookkeeper part-time because I can look at my reports from a week or over a month and see how much time I’ve actually spent doing that.

It’s a really simple, easy-to-use interface, there’s some really nice details in there like the ‘scribbles’ when you complete a 15 minute bubble of time are different, so there’s kind of a texture to it there. It’s also growing to accommodate popular feature requests as requested on the Get Satisfaction forum, which is really responsive if you have any problems, or if you have feature requests, I’ve seen new feature be introduced since I’ve been using it.

Now I shouldn’t end without telling you that it isn’t free, there is a cost, but it’s just $20 a year and I think it is well worth it for someone who wants to get things done. As I said my name is Emily and my Twitter name is @gradualist you can find out more about me there, thanks for listening!

Do you have a tool that you swear by? Maybe a web design tool, or just a tool that keeps you organized? If so send us an audio review we can put on the show.

The role of gender in web design

We have received an interesting audio question from Dennis. He asks whether any of our clients have expressed a concern over the gender of our designers. He cites his own experience where a female client said his designs were too ‘practical’ and not ‘fun enough’ because he was a man.

First off, I have to say that your client sounds rather sexist to me! The implication that men cannot design a ‘fun’ site is absurd.

That said, gender does play a part in a designers style. For example, women are much better able to perceive colour than men and so tend to make better use of colour. However, gender is just one of many factors that shapes a designers style. Other factors include:

Cultural background
Design schooling
Personality
Design leaning (e.g. illustration, typography, photography)

The list could go on. The point is that what we perceive as masculine or feminine design, is not solely produced by the associated gender. There is overlap and a blurring of lines.

Where I think things get more tricky is when a male designer is asked to design for a female audience (or vice versa). This is more challenging because good design involves empathy with the user. Unsurprisingly it is harder for a man to put himself in the position of a woman. However, it is probably no more difficult than for a young person to visualize the needs of an older user. It is the ability to do this that separates a good designer from an exceptional one. The key is thorough research into the target audience and an ability to steer clear of preconceptions and stereotypes.

158. Home

Posted in Classic shows on March 25, 2009 by Paul Boag

On this week’s show: We share the highlights of SXSW, discuss home working, and interview Rob Borley about project management.

Podcast: Download (31.2MB)

The reality of home working

Housekeeping

Headscape still recruiting!

Headscape is still recruiting. We are looking for an enthusiastic, talented developer to join our team, working from of our offices in Hampshire. For more information see the job advertisement on Boagworld.

News and events

The best of SXSW

Well, SXSW is over and I am back in the UK. But what happened at the conference? What was the big news this year?

That is actually a hard question to answer. There is so much at SXSW that it is almost impossible to get a sense of everything that is going on. Even if you could attend every panel that isn’t always where the real action takes place.

The real conference often happens at the parties and in the corridors. In fact, more than one spontaneous panel was started via Twitter, thanks to official panels being full.

Panels this year ranged from the downright dull to all out flame wars! One that I unfortunately missed was "Is Spec Work Evil!". However, Marcus attended and tells me it was particularly fiery. Personally, I am very much against speculative work as I have said before. However, not everybody would agree and the panel seemed to reflect this diverse opinion.

One panel I did make was Paul Annett’s amazingly inspirational talk on Easter Eggs and design twists. The talk focused on the little things you can add to your site to make users go ‘oooo that’s clever’.

Too often I neglect such ‘bells and whistles’ in favour of usability and accessibility. Paul demonstrated how these different priorities can sit side by side without compromising each other. He showed some great examples including the hidden arrow in the FedEx logo and the vines on the Silverback website.

The final panel I want to mention is ‘Being a UX Team of One‘ by Leah Burley of Adaptive Path. To be honest the title of this one was a little misleading (at least from my perspective).

What I took away from this session was that design should not be a solitary activity, solely reliant on the creative inspiration of one individual. Leah seemed to be arguing for a more collaborative approach especially at the wireframe stage. She proposed that all of those involved in the project should sit down together and hammer out the wireframe designs.

This addressed two separate problems we have been having at Headscape…

The developers concerns at not being involved early enough in the process.
The question of who should do wireframing – the designer or the IA person.

Best of all Leah’s presentation was very pragmatic. She provided lots of practical approaches that encourage idea generation and collaboration. I highly recommend listening to the podcast of this when it is released.

Browser testing and IE6

In other news, there seems to have been a lot written about browsers this past week. Three stories in particular caught my eye…

.net Magazine seems to have hopped on the ‘dump IE6′ bandwagon – My opinion is the same as that of Jeremy Keith as expressed in last weeks show. It is not a matter of dropping IE6. We should instead being deciding whether we wish to offer it the same level of support as modern browsers. I am entirely in favour of providing IE6 with a basic stylesheet that avoids its shortcomings. However, I dislike the idea of dropping it entirely.
Microsoft has released SuperPreview this week that allows Windows users to test different versions of IE simultaneously. I have to say this looks like an impressive tool. It allows you to view IE6 and IE7 side by side. It also has many other tools that may also be useful. Support for IE8 and other browsers will follow and although it is currently in beta, I think it will quickly become an indispensable tool for Windows based web designers. Just a shame there is no mac support!
Finally, Sitepoint have written a brief outline of how to create the perfect browser testing suite. Ideally for those starting out it lists various online browser simulators, virtual machines and desktop browser emulators.

Browser testing continues to be a pain in the neck and I for one would be willing to pay for a decent way of streamlining this whole process. This is especially true now that IE8 has been officially released and we have another browser to add into the mix.

A simplicity case study

A few weeks ago I wrote about the importance of simplifying your website. Well, this week Gerry McGovern has written the perfect case study to support the argument I was putting forward.

‘Removing poor quality content increases customer satisfaction‘ talks about how the Microsoft website consists of a staggering 10 millions pages. Of those pages 3 million have never been viewed!

The post goes on to explain how the Microsoft Office team took a different approach with their site by removing irrelevant pages. According to McGovern…

By weeding the garden, the top task pages became easier to find. But just as importantly it became harder to find a minor task page when you were looking for a top task page.

In short, removing pages reduced noise. Disturbing though it sounds, I think we could all learn something from Microsoft’s example.

An introduction to Microformats

My final post today comes from Richard Rutter’s blog. It is basically an introduction to Microformats aimed at the non-geek. He wrote the post because he recently found himself trying to explain microformats to a client and could not think of a good post that covered the subject from their perspective.

Personally, I am not sure it is necessary to tell a client you are implementing Microformats. The cost of adding them is so small and the benefits so hard to explain, that you maybe better off just doing it.

That said, this is an excellent post and if you are struggling to understand the point of Microformats, this is certainly worth reading.

Interview: Rob Borley on Project Management

Paul: So, joining me today is Mr. Rob Borley. Hello Rob.

Rob: Hi Paul, how are you doing?

Paul: Very well indeed. Good to have you on the show. It’s been a little while.

Rob: It has, It has. It’s weird hearing the show above you, um rather than being below.

Paul: Oh yes, because you sit upstairs, don’t you?

Rob: Indeed.

Paul: Do you actually hear it?

Rob: I do. It’s like have a little base bin ?

Paul: Awh. So, um, we have kind of been thinking for a little while that we need to get someone on the show to talk about project management. And the idea was we’d get some high profile web design project manager to come in and talk about web design project management. Then I realised, um, that I can’t actually think of any. You know, I really don’t know of any kind of web design project managers out there, other than obviously the people that work at Headscape.

Rob: Well, maybe there’s a gap in the market.

Paul: I think there is a gap in the market.

Rob: (unintelligible) celebrity project manager.

Paul: Well I think that’s somewhat of an oxymoron, but setting that aside, lets shift around a bit, yeah, so, um, so we thought, lets get you on the show. Um, now, you’re quite and interesting case because you started of as a techie.

Rob: Yes.

Paul: And you became a project manager.

Rob: Yes.

Paul: And, so, um, let’s start by talking about the role of project manager. How would you describe your core role? What is it that you do? I should know this I guess.

Rob: Well, you mean other than manage projects.

Paul: Ok, you just have to make a joke out of it. But you know what I’m getting at.

Rob: Yeah yeah. I mean, I guess, um, the main thing that we do is shovel shit, really. We deal with crap. You know, the main thing project manager would do is a filter between clients and the production team for the project. I mean, there are a couple of stages I guess. So you’ve got the planning part of the job, which is essentially working out what it is you need to do, um, making sure you got the results to do it, plotting a nice time line so they can all fit as far as having deadline. And then you’ve got the people said, because really project management is a people job. You need to know how to get the most out of all the people that are in your project team, um including the client. You need to include the client in your thinking, always. Yah, that’s essentially what we do.

Paul: Yah. It’s a people person thing. I always thought you were so charasmatic. Ok, so, I mean, I guess the question is, if you look at the kind of, if you look at Headscape, and the way that we’re organised, we’ve got four developers, four designers, and three project managers. I mean, that’s a lot of project managers. And, you know the question is, why, why have project mangers at all? Why couldn’t the designers and the developers do the job? Why couldn’t it be spread across multiple people? Justify you exsistance, Rob.

Rob: Yeah, this question kind of makes me nervous here. I feel like I’m re-interviewing for my own job. Not that I interviewed in the first place, but, I guess in one sense, if you were in a small project environment, you could almost get away with one person. If, you know, its a one person job, you could get away with them managing themselves for a limited amount of time. Um, but, as soon as you get beyond jobs which are more than one person, um, and go on for an extended period of time, you start needing to provide some glue to stick things together. You need someone whose got an overview of everything that’s going on. You know, the developers have got a very developer mindset about the way things happen. Designers are the same way, they know about the design stuff. Um, but actually translating what the client wants and feeding that into both areas and bring them together is what’s missing, if you don’t have a project manager.

Paul: So, to some degree, project management becomes necessary with scale. The bigger the projects, and the more complex the projects, then the more a need for a dedicated project manager.

Rob: Yeah, definitely. I mean, I guess the real role of a project manager in these situations is the facilitator. You’ve got all of these tools which are basically your resources, your developers, your designers, um, and you need to be able to enable them to work effectively together to produce what the end product is going to be.

Paul: So here’s a question that I didn’t pre-give you, in advance, which is always the best type. Why, why, why become a project manager? What made you – because you were heading up our technical development team, you were, you know, you were doing very well. Why did you feel the need to get involved in what you call shit shoveling?

Rob: Well, I think my main motivation was, Headscape was growing, and we started employing all of these younger, more dynamic, much more talented, better looking developers, that were basically going to show me up. So I figured that before I got shown in true light that I was going to need to move somewhere else. Um, no, well that’s partly true. Really, I think, its the people’s aspect that I’m really interested in. A good project manager is someone who is able to understand how his resources or how her resources work and how your clients work, and joining the two together. Um, while I quite like writing code really, I’m not passionate about it. So that side of it, you know, I reached as far as I wanted to go, and I really enjoy the people thing.

Paul: Ok. So what other, I mean, what other kind of characteristics do you think make a good project manager, obviously the people skills you talked about, what other, I mean if there are other people out there going well actually I’m not that passionate about coding, or I’m not that passionate about design, but I am passionate about the web, I do like the web design process, perhaps project management is the way I ought to be going. You know, what skills, what characteristics do they need, what personality traits do they need?

Rob: I think well, you need to be able to plan. Um, you know, planning is very very important. If you plan well, then your project will usually go well.

Paul: I like the cornification in that.

Rob: You have to be able to predict the future is helpful.

Paul: Yes.

Rob: A major part of what we de in the planning stages is assessing risk. You know, so, we’ve got what we’re starting with, we’ve got what we want to achieve, and we’ve got a time scale, now we need to work out what things might appear that are unforeseen, which are going to affect us reaching the time scale. So being able to foresee the future is helpful. Um, and so planning, being quite analytical and thorough. The logical background I have from being a programmer, a developer, is really helpful because you have to approach project management in a very analytical way, to make sure you don’t miss things. So there’s that side of it. And then there’s communication skills. You not only need to be able to communicate with a client affectively so they show that you understand what they want, um, and they understand where you are with the project, and they’re happy because a happy client makes everyone happy. But you also then need to communicate that with the various personalities in your team. You know, whether thats the developers locked up in a dark room with no social skills, or the crazy charismatic designers who…

Paul: You’ve just gone with stereotypes that so don’t apply. If I look at our team, no offense to our designers, they’re the ones that sit in the darkened room with their nose right pressed against the screen. And the developers are the ones that are crazy and never do any work.

Rob: (unintelligible) something about reading personalities. No, but you see my point. You’ve got these almost extremes, especially in the web, I guess, in the web world, you’ve got these extremes of personailities which somehow you need to be able to communicate with and put it all together and so, yeah, that’s an important skill. I think the third area, is to be quite relaxed about life. Because things will go wrong and do go wrong, it doesn’t matter how well you plan and how good you are at predicting the future. Stuff will appear that is completely unforeseen and will completely throw (unintelligible). And everyone gets really upset and people will shout at you and it goes a bit nuts. Um, and if you go nuts as well, you project team falls apart, because they look at you as the calm rudder in the storms of life. I can feel my other project manager buddies laughing at me, um, but if you’re calm and you can not get stressed at that but actually see, try and find a clear path through a very stressful situation, then really helps.

Paul: I would so be the worst project manager in the world. I’ve got the attention span of a newt, I’ve got no organisational abilities and I get stressed at everything. So overall, I think I’d fail.

Rob: Yeah, stick to web celeb.

Paul: Yes, I’ll come up with some other title that sounds good. Um, ok, so you talked about this really is, I can honestly say, a foreign area to me. Right? You talk about planning a project upfront. I’m not a planning person. Right? And there seems to be so many variables involved in a project and so much as you say, that can potentially go wrong. How do you plan it? I mean, you know, the kind of thing that you always talk about, when you talk about project management is endless gantt charts that seem to be outdated in about 5 minutes, sort of kicking a project off. How to you effectively plan a project?

Rob: Um, well, we do use a gantt. We always start a project with a gantt. And, um because it seems like thats what project managers are supposed to do, so we justify the time with a gantt. Um, but you do need, um, I think assessing risk is something that is vital in successful project management. Its something that we’ve been doing at Headscape, um, increasingly more over the last year or so otherwise this need to actually spend time highlighting what could actually go wrong here. So, you look at, I’m not going to be able to think of any examples now, but a particular, let’s say you building a shop or something. So potential things which could delay that project would be: the client not getting around to telling you what the products are on the shelf and content population is a big risk on meeting a project deadline, because it is out of your control. So, its like, I need the content by this date, and he needs to put the content in by X date. If the client doesn’t do it, there’s nothing you can do about it.

Paul: I’m guessing integration must always be a big risk. Integrating with third party applications.

Rob: Exactly, so if you’ve got some sort of third party database or a web service you’ve got to pull in, something that you’ve done a bit before, but you don’t know anything about, that’s a risk. Because you can guesstimate what’s going to happen, but its unforeseen. And so, the trick is basically, to find all the tasks that have these risks and then multiply (unintelligible) an hour by some random number. And then make the rest up as you go along.

Paul: So what about once the project gets going, how, what techniques and tools maybe do you use for monitoring and controlling the process and trying to keep on top of everything.

Rob: Yeah, I mean, there are lots of tools out there, obviously, lots of funky web-based ones, um, there is no substitute for talking to you team. Um, trying to (unintelligible) email or basecamp or something is impossibly without talking to you team. So, communicate. It’s a big part of what we do. You have to talk to the people doing the work, you have to talk to the clients, um you have to keep the lines of communication open. Um, but as far as actually keeping track of what’s going on, we do use basecamp, um which is great for managing lists, basically, you manage lists. So from our gantt shell, we’ll break it up into a series of tasks if you like, wide areas, um, and then, (unintelligible) ask people to add comments to them and take them off and then we’ve got kind of an overview of where our project is. Um, and hopefully from there, and when we’ve got the gant shell, we’ve got some dates, some milestones and reminders like you should have done this by then, um and so, you use that to kind of keep track of where you are.

Paul: Cool. What about, so that’s kind of dealing with the internal side of things. What about when it comes to the client, I mean, you talked about, you said earlier, a happy client makes everybody happy kind of thing. So what makes a client happy? What are the things that really, or perhaps turn it around the other way, what are the things that really piss of a client and where can it really go wrong?

Rob: This is really where the people side of it really comes in because every client is different. Some clients want you to talk to them for five hours a day, hold their hand, you know, spoon feed them, and some clients just want to know when it’s finished. So initially, when you’re kind of trying to assess your project team, if you like, your resources and what you’ve got, assessing the personality of your client early on, will really put you in a good place. Um, but, I guess, general principles, if you’re honest, it helps. Um, so, be realistic about what you’re telling your client is going to happen. Don’t promise the Earth by yesterday. Because then you won’t deliver and then they’ll get upset. If there’s going to be a problem, if things have slipped for some unknown reason, then tell them as soon as you know. Tell them as quickly as you possibly can. Um, manage their expectations is kind of the phrase that we use a lot. You gotta manage you clients expectations so that they’re not expecting something that you can’t deliver. And um, and then that limits the amount of upsetness that they get.

Paul: Slippage is a big one, isn’t it? This kinda whole area of things like, you know problems you kinda face, things, like slippage, scope creep, non-delivery, I mean, how do you have any kind of broad techniques for dealing with these kinds of things, or is it just kinda communications thing again.

Rob: It’s mainly I think a communication thing again. Um, part of the planning stage is trying to asses these risks and so you try and build in contingency to cope with those, and if you’re building enough contingency, you deliver the project early and that makes everyone really happy, even if its a long project, you deliver it early, you’ve exceeded their expectation also. Um, so I think, if somethings going to slip, I think you should say you’ve got to be honest. Sometimes things are just out of your control, so you’re two weeks before the end of a project, you in the middle of snagging, your lead developer goes down with appendicitis. There’s nothing you can do about that, and so you just need to communicate with the client and hope they take it well.

Paul: So wishing everything works out, I’m loving that approach. Ok, so, um, let’s finish of with a piece of generic advice. Either people starting out in project management or those that have had project management foisted upon them. You know, whats the kind of one piece of advice that you would leave for people?

Rob: Get to know your team. I think that’s the main thing I would say. Um, its kind of like, when you drive you car, you’re environment is a very organic, dynamic thing, you know what it really what’s going to happen and the only thing you’ve got to get you through it is that you understand you car. You know almost instinctively how it works, how to drive it it, if you get to that situation with your team, then whatever the project throws at you, you kind of, you can deal with it. If you understand how you client is going to react to a certain situtation, you can intincfully deal with it. And it keeps the stress levels low. You need to find ways of managing your stress levels.

Paul: There you go, that’s great advice. Thank you vert much for that, it was wonderful. I really appreciate you coming on the show.

Rob: My pleasure.

Thanks goes to Meredith Marsh for transcibing this interview.

Feature: Home Working

I was recently contacted by a friend of mine Marieke Guy about writing a guest post for her blog on remote working.

I have been working at home for over 7 years now and am a great believer in the benefits. However when I actually sat down to write the post, I realised just how long it has taken me to find the right way of working.

As a large number of people who listen to this podcast work from home, I thought I would share my experiences to date and my hopes of where remote working will take me in the future.

134. Chrome

Posted in Classic shows on September 7, 2008 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?

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.

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.

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.

124. HTML 5

Posted in Classic shows on July 2, 2008 by Paul Boag

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

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.

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?

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.

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?

122. Screencasting

Posted in Classic shows on June 18, 2008 by Paul Boag

In this weeks show we have Ian Lloyd discussing Sitepoints HTML reference and we take a look at creating screencasts.

Podcast: Download (28.7MB)

Watch the behind the scenes video

News and events

Typography everywhere

This week has seen a plethora of posts about typography. There is an article about changes being made to typography in Firefox 3, a post dedicated to working with paragraphs and some future developments in CSS 3 fonts. Combined with the growing support for embeddable fonts, it would appear that web typography has a rosy future.

Although all of these posts are interesting, I feel we are not making use of the typographic tools we have already. I have learnt a huge amount by reading what people like Richard Rutter and Jon Hicks have to say on the subject. For example how many of you…

Ever change the default kerning
Really get specific in your cascade of fonts
Consider vertical alignment
Think about the relative sizing of our various typographic elements

The list could go on.

Many web designers choose to ignore web typography because it is so restricted. However, this will soon change. We need to learn to walk with the basic tools currently available before we run with what is to come.

Accessibility cheat sheet

Our next story follows on nicely from last week’s feature in which we addressed accessibility quick fixes.

Aaron Baker has written an accessibility checklist aimed at designers and developers who know little about web accessibility. The idea is that by simply referring to the list during development they will be able to avoid the major accessibility issues.

Aaron is the first to admit this isn’t an ideal solution. He also accepts the checklist fails to cover everything. However, in my opinion he has done a damn good job at making the accessibility guidelines… accessible!

What I like most is that he also provides a PDF version that prints out as a single page. Instead of having to wade through pages of W3C guidelines you can print out a single page and pin it to the wall. Ideal for those starting down the road of accessibility.

Does this mean we can ignore WCAG? Absolutely not. However, this is certainly an easier starting point for those who are intimidated by the subject of web accessibility.

Advice on wireframes

We are having an interesting discussion within Headscape at the moment. Where does the job of an information architect (IA) end and that of a designer begin? When it comes to wireframing in particular, the line is blurred. A wireframe is often produced by the IA but can strongly define the layout and design. This reduces the designer to skinning a site, which is a real waste of their skills.

I was therefore excited to read the first in what will be a series of posts on wireframing. The author identifies exactly the problem we have been struggling with and talks about page description documents. These documents differ from traditional wireframes because they do not endeavour to establish a layout. Instead this is left to the designer. A page description document focuses on identifying and prioritising content. It is then down to the designer to represent this on the site.

It is an interesting approach and one that I think has a lot of merit. However, I am equally excited to see the other posts in this series, where the author promises to show us example wireframes and provide more details on his approach.

Top five tips for new web designers

The final news story of today is an unusual choice as it comes from our own forum. Our forum is always full of great threads, but one in particular caught my eye this week because it covered the most common question I get asked; ‘what advice do you have for a new web designer?’.

It is not a long thread (yet!) and so is easy enough to follow. However, each poster has provided some excellent advice in the form of their top 5 tips.

The tips include…

Advice on business
Techniques for improving your skills
Areas to focus on
Books and sites to read
What to learn first
How to increase your profile

Without exception they are all gold dust and if you are new to design then definitely give them a read.

Equally if you have been a web designer for a few years take a moment to post your own contribution. I think you will probably learn something at the same time.

Feature: Creating Screencasts

Video is becoming an intrinsic part of the web and not just dumb ass videos on YouTube. Video can be used to show off products and provide online presentations. But how do you create a high quality screencast on a budget? We look at this issue in this weeks feature.

Interview: Ian Lloyd on Sitepoint HTML Reference

Paul: OK. So joining me today is Ian Lloyd. Hello Ian.

Ian: Hello Paul!

Paul: Have we had you on Boagworld before or is it just .Net?

Ian: Erm… Actually never in real life person. I did the video thing for you before, the screencast.

Paul: Yeah. That’s it. I knew there was something.

Ian: I’ve heard my dulcet tones before.

Paul: Yeah but not on a live, real, happening interview type basis.

Ian: Is this happening? What as in cool, hip and happening? Wow.

Paul: This is happening right now! So there we go. That’s exciting. So the reason I have Ian on the show today is that he had just undertaken and completed a mammoth project no less, in the form of a HTML reference guide that is now available via SitePoint. Now we’ve talked before on the show about the CSS reference guide but the HTML one is a new project that is beta at the moment. Why have you showed a beta tag on it? Come on, put your money where your mouth is. Commit to a real live version!

Ian:Well that’s not really my shout in fairness but I think the reason they do it is that with all the will of the world and all the technical editing that goes on and all the rest of it, invariably there’s going to be things that will crop up.

Paul: I was always under the impression that you were infallible Ian.

Ian:Well I would to keep that myth going but it’s obviously completely untrue. But no, I think it’s sensible. From what I can gather they did this with the CSS reference and they told me that they did get some good feedback as a result of doing this. So it gives them an opportunity to capture anything that has so far evaded various editing stages. There are little things that you can easily, easily miss. So it makes sense. Put it in front of a whole bunch of pedants and you will find that things will be revealed that you weren’t aware of.

Paul:Yes certainly. So tell us a little bit about how the project came about. How did you end up working on this from SitePoint and how you get involved?

Ian:Right… Well it’s actually quite a long story that I’ll try and shorten down. Basically I’ve got a bit of history with SitePoint. It goes back to probably 2001/2002, something like that where I was writing articles for them. I had written a few and they had been scored quite highly. At the end of 2003, I took a year out of work.

Paul: Ah I didn’t know… Yes I did know that.

Ian:While I was travelling around the world I made it my business to try and call in on people that I knew from the web. You know, you’ve part of the world so I’ll pop in and say hello. That’s what I did with the SitePoint guys. I was in Melbourne for a while so I thought I’d pop in and say hello. So we did lunch and I was having a chat with one of the guys there who was saying “Oh, have you ever thought of writing an accessibility book?” and I was like “Oh, I don’t know. I don’t know if I’ve got a book in me. It seems like a lot of work.” But not long after that I was asked if I’d like to do some tech editing and I thought “Yeah OK, I’ll do that” and I actually did it while I was still travelling around Australia in the van. So that was actually quite easy to do, wasn’t too bad at all. And then what happened is that when I got back to the UK I was asked “Do you want to write a book?” and this is the beginners book you have reviewed in the past on the show. So it’s kind of been an escalation from there really. So there was that book and I did a couple of bits and pieces for APress and then not so long ago I got the call back from SitePoint saying “Do you want to do this HTML reference?”. At the time I thought “I don’t know. I’m not sure. Does the world need another HTML reference?”. But I kind of thought that when I did the first book, and that’s done pretty well and I’ve had some really good feedback, so I though “Well, let’s think about this. Maybe it’s worth doing”. In my mind I convinced myself that this wouldn’t be a difficult thing to write…

Paul: *Laughs knowingly*

Ian:See you think you know HTML. You think you know it because you use it everyday and I though “Well how difficult can it be?” compared to say the Javascript reference they were writing. There’s a million and one ways you can approach something with Javascript where as with HTML there’s a finite number of elements or tags, whichever you prefer to use, that you can use in any given scenario so you think it’s pretty straight forward isn’t it. That’s what I thought anyway and I was also thinking in terms of browser compatibility the bigger problems come from the CSS you put over the top. That’s where you get all the quirks happening. So I thought to my mind, “Yeah this isn’t going to be too difficult a job”. But I think I underestimated it.

Paul:Is that not always the way when it comes to any kind of project like this that it always ends up being loads bigger than you thought it was going to be.

Ian:I think it actually surprised me how much more work there was involved. I don’t know if you did that little test a little while ago that was one of those things everyone was sending around, how many HTML elements can you do in 2 minutes or something. Everyone was having a go at it. You think you know quite a lot but then you realise there’s so many more you didn’t know and there was so many that I vaguely remember and but probably would never use. That was the funny thing, writing about these elements where I think “Well, that’s that one done. Never going to use and nobody’s every going to read it either but it’s got to be covered.

Paul:So with the CSS reference guide that they produced they have now turned it into a book. Are they intending to do the same with this? Is that the plan?

Ian:Absolutely. And that was the other strange thing I thought “This is kind of a strange business model. They are going to put it on-line for free but also gonna do a book. Will people actually buy a book?” But I’m sure they don’t do these things without doing the research first. I’m pretty sure they’ve got a good idea on what they’re doing with this. I never went into it thinking I’m going to make millions out of this because it’s never going to happen. Anyone who’s written a book, yourself included…

Paul:I’m still witting so I’m still in that naive state of thinking “Yeah, it’s going to sell hundreds of thousands of copies and millions of copies and I’m going to be rich”. So don’t shatter it.

Ian: Sorry Paul.

Paul: Just say how much money I’m going to make.

Ian: Oh yeah, you’re going to be rolling on a bed of money. You’re not going to know what to do with the stuff.

Paul: Excellent. Wonderful. Great. I’m looking forward to that. *laughs* So basically it’s gonna turn into a book before too long.

Ian: Ah yes.

Paul:You mention that there were some things in there that you thought “I’ve written this but I’m never going to use this and probably no one else is as well”. I noticed there were a couple of sections in there dedicated to depreciated HTML tags and stuff that people actually shouldn’t use. That’s a bit of an unusual decision isn’t it – to put in stuff people that people actually shouldn’t be using. Why take that route?

Ian:Well the thing is because it’s a reference you have to include everything. So everything that is in the W3C approved recommendation, everything in there is included. Even if it’s as much use as a chocolate teapot it has to go in there. And that includes the deprecated tags but there’s also things that are included such as blink or bgsound or marquee that were never actually defined in any standard but because they have almost universal support, not all of them have the same level of support, but basically there’s a lot of elements out there that were never defined in the standard but are well supported. So the decision is this has to go in there, we can’t deny it’s existence. It may not be something that anyone would want to use but as it’s a reference book we should include it. There were some that we didn’t include that I can’t remember off the top of my head what they would be. Things that were perhaps defined in Netscape 4 and just are not supported in anything and given that Netscape 4 is dead and gone a long time ago, there were some things that didn’t make it in. But the reason for having a second index that said “Here are some elements that you shouldn’t use or should avoid or these are deprecated ones” was really a case of saying that we’ve got this index of all these things and I don’t want anyone to think that because it’s in the index that it’s necessarily approved. So I wanted to kind of pull them out and say “It’s in the reference but actually we don’t really you to use those.”

Paul:Which are the worse culprits? Which are the ones you think that people are using a lot and they really, really shouldn’t be? Your chance now to lecture people and preach to them about their bad HTML.

Ian:Well strangely enough I don’t actually see a lot of them used now. I think probably the most common is people using the bold and italics, the <b> and the <i> tags, when really they should be using strong and em. Then again the b and i tags do have their place but they are usually misused. Thankfully the kind if things that I wouldn’t want people to use, you don’t tend to see much nowadays anyway like the blink, marquee or bgsound that was always a pet hate of mine. You’d visit a site and then suddenly you’d get some Indonesian Gamelan music blaring through that was set in a bgsound. I was kind of thinking it’s good that this is gone but if you go to any page on MySpace and they’re replaced it with something that has got sound in Flash. So yeah, that may have gone but they have replaced it with something equally annoying.

Paul:Now there’s a little question there. You say that bold and italic have got that place. How is it supposed to be used? Educate me as to the proper use of those two.

Ian:Well if you what you are actually marking up something that describes something typographical. So if you are putting the b tag around something because you are describing it as bold. So it’s that kind of context. I use in the examples on the reference it’s like I’m describing a sign of something like that. So there are reasons when you use it but generally speaking when people are using it is when you want emphasis or strong emphasis. In most cases what I would end up using would be strong and em because that is what I’m normally trying to do, emphasis.

Paul:What other kind of bad practice have you been seeing? What are the things, not just with specific tags but general bad practice, that are your pet peeves when it comes to HTML? What things are people doing a lot that just piss you off?

Ian:Like I said earlier, because of the kind of sites that I tend to look at I don’t actually stumble across too many coding sins because that’s kind of the circles I’m in I suppose. The funniest thing is when you see your own mark-up from years ago and I’ve just had to do this for something at work where I’ve taken on a reworking of something written 10 years ago and I’m like “Oh my God. This is awful”. It had been duplicated 5 times instead of one file with the logic inside that one file. So it was like “Hang on. I have to do this five times over?”. But it was nice to go back and see something that was old and table layout and all the rest of it and give it a good clean up in the process. So yeah, it’s funny when you look at your own mark-up and think “I’ve moved on”.

Paul:Even when you just look at what you learned from when you started doing standards to when you’re doing it now. I look back on the early standards work I did and it’s all div-tastic. There’s just divs everywhere.

Ian: Oh yeah. But there’s no meaning to the document as such.

Paul: Yeah. No meaning whatsoever. It used CSS so it must be alright *laughs* Which obviously doesn’t quite work does it in reality but there you go.

Ian:I guess the kind of thing that I really see a lot is just general sloppiness. People not closing tags when they’ve said they are using XHTML or unsymmetrical opening and closing. Those kind of things. Probably the first thing is missing alt attributes for images which is such an easy thing to put right but I see it so often. I guess probably the worse offences come from the kind of people who probably have never looked at a reference and may never look at a reference so I don’t know that this would solve the problems. And by that what I mean is people who would never actually get their hands dirty in the code. They’ll be using things like Frontpage, Word. You know – save as HTML in Word. You just want to beat them over the head with a large reference book. I don’t know if those kind of people are beyond hope. Maybe we we’ll be there at one point who knows. Maybe they are not beyond saving.

Paul: Nobody is beyond hope.

Ian:Funnily enough, I was saying about the Frontpage thing. It’s quite shocking I was looking at the program for a local college evening course and out of curiosity I flicked through to the computing section to see if they were doing any web design courses and
yay, there were. How To Build A Website and it was a seven week course, how to build a website using Frontpage. And it was like head slap, what are they doing?

Paul: Ah. That’s amazing that people are still doing that.

Ian: Shocking. So yeah. It’s not going to go away in the short term still.

Paul:When you were going through this reference, putting it together, was there a tag that you came across that you thought “Why don’t I use this more often? That’s an underused tag.” For example, I’ve just suddenly started using definition lists more.

Ian: Paul, you’ve taken the words right out of my mouth. That’s exactly what I was going to say.

Paul: There you go then.

Ian:That’s exactly one of those things that I don’t tend to use an awful lot myself but there are certainly uses for it. When we did this quiz thing that we were talking about earlier, I did with some people at first. So few of them had actually heard of definition lists. It was like “What is this markup of which you speak? What is this dl? What is this dd?” They had never heard of it and it surprises me but, I don’t know, maybe it shouldn’t be a surprise. You see list items used absolutely everywhere but it seems to be a bit of mystery to people. So that would be one that people could use more often and I’d certainly like to see people use them more often.

Paul:Umm. I’ve found it really useful. It’s surprisingly how many of the things, for example a news story where you have a title and then the description underneath the news story. There’s loads of examples like that where there are these paired matchings that suit a definition list so well. It’s a cool tag, if a HTML tag is capable of being cool which is probably doubtful.

Ian:There are some others as well which I would certainly like to see people use more often and they’re not ones that I don’t use, I use them all the time. Things like the accessibility specific type ones like for forms: label, fieldset and legend. I’d like to see them used more often. To some people this is something that they still don’t get. Of course in general, using the proper semantic markup. As you’ve already mentioned sites that are div-tastic. Stick a couple of headings in there and some unordered lists and already you’re starting to give your document more structure.

Paul:So talking about semantics and all that stuff, I noticed that you have a section dedicated to Microformats. Microformats aren’t really part of the W3C specification so why did you decide to include them?

Ian:Because it’s really cool. Yeah, it’s really cool stuff Paul. No, the reason really is because in the process of drawing up the table of contents, looking at all the elements we needed to cover, it became clear that there are certain things that HTML can’t do. Obviously this is not a revelation otherwise Microformats wouldn’t have come about anyway. But it felt right to put it in because essentially although Microformats are still developing they do go through a rigid process of being documented, discuss, ratified and all the kind of thing. So while it isn’t W3C recommendation it feels like it’s controlled. Also it doesn’t really do any harm. You can add this in over the top of HTML. You’re still using plain old HTML but adding that extra richness in without necessarily doing any harm. So it felt like something safe to put in. I guess the only problem with putting something like this in, at least for the printed version of the book, is that as they are developing it can get out of date. At least with the on-line version as things get added and they are adopted, that can easily be added in. It felt like a useful thing to do.

Paul:And it’s good to give Microformats higher profile because I think there are still a lot of people that are unaware of them. So it’s good.

Ian:I was gonna say it is by no means a complete Microformats reference. It really is still a fairly entry level introduction. I mean there are books out there specifically for Microformats. If someone really wants to learn more they’d do better to pick up a book or go to Microformats.org to learn more. Hopefully it would give some exposure to it that perhaps wouldn’t otherwise. And the other good thing about it is because the reference on SitePoint is very, very searchable hopefully by the time that Google’s indexed it you will find people that stumble across that wouldn’t have done otherwise and just from doing a search from inside the site itself. There’s a chance that people might learn about Microformats when they might not have otherwise of done. But we’ll see.

Paul:Bearing in mind that a lot of people listening to this podcast are web designers and you know, they are sitting there going “Well I know HTML”, like we were saying at the beginning that you have this perception that is something you know back to front. So just to finish up with is there a kind of one area that you really want to challenge people over or one piece of good practice that you’d like to push people on where they’re not as hot as they should be.

Ian:Hmmm… That’s a tricky one. I’m obviously aware that the audience of the podcast know a fair amount already. I guess you do have some people that are relative beginners so I’m not entirely sure the advice is appropriate for the audience. But the kind of advice that I would always give is that, and maybe I’m teaching people to suck eggs here, but really it’s so much more useful if you can learn from the ground up. You know, learn the code using really simple tools. I use Dreamweaver a lot, an awful lot, but that’s because I know how Dreamweaver is going to handle the markup. I know if there any little forbals, what it’s gonna do. So it’s very quick for me to use that without causing any real damage. But I wouldn’t really recommend that to a beginner. I’d say learn the basics. Walk before you run. Obviously things like I mentioned earlier – Word and Frontpage. Never, ever dream of using anything like that because they just do an awful, shocking job of it. In essence, HTML is not difficult to get to grips with. What I tend to find is a problem is what you then layer over the top of it. It’s the browser incompatibilities with CSS and obviously with Javascript it can be as simple or as complex as you like. HTML is not massively difficult to learn but it’s still useful to learn from the ground u
p and not let a tool do it for you. I think that’ll be my advice.

Paul:On one hand it’s not difficult to learn but on the other hand I think it’s quite difficult to master, if that makes sense. It takes quite a long time…

Ian:You’re talking about the pedantic kind of… When you start to argue about the fine details about which element is appropriate for this usage and you can get into some debates over some things, yeah.

Paul:I liked the way you referred to it as pedantic. Do you think we’ve gone a little bit overboard with our obsession with HTML and marking up everything correctly?

Ian:I don’t know. I think it’s a good thing that people discuss and try and squeeze the most out of it. But there are some grey areas and you do sometimes think it is a bit limited, hence things like Microformats adding the richness on top of it. But I don’t know. It’s usually good natured, put it that way.

Paul:Oh OK. I thought I was going to get you to say something really controversial that would get you flamed but I didn’t quite manage to…

Ian: What luck “HTML SUCKS!”?

Paul: Yeah like “Just use Frontpage. It’ll be fine man.”

Ian: Yeah something like that.

Paul:OK. Thank you so much for coming on the show and where can people check this out if they want to try out this reference for themselves?

Ian: The HTML reference is at http://reference.sitepoint.com/html and if you want the CSS reference, replace /HTML with /CSS. And I understand that the Javascript reference written by James Edwards aka BrotherCake is still ongoing. So at some part there will be a third part to this reference. So we’ll have all three layers.

Paul:And I have to say I’ve been impressed with what I’ve seen so far. I’ve actually been using the HTML reference believe it or not. In fact I used it yesterday to check something. I can highly recommend it. Much better than that crappy old W3Schools so you can ignore that from now on and use that instead. OK, thanks very much Ian. That was really good and I look forward to seeing you soon.

Ian: OK. Thank you very much Paul.

Thanks to Lee Theobald for transcribing this interview.

Listeners feedback:

Can you trust developers?

JW writes: I have been on the buying side of both fixed and hourly projects with lackluster results lately. The process can be quite frustrating for me with some of the following bubbling to the top:

Inaccurate estimates both in cost and time

A lack of commitment to carry out all agreed items within a scope when it takes longer to accomplish than originally planned.

The need to ask for more money when the scope doesn’t change.

Which leaves me asking “How much is the developers “word” worth?”

JW’s email goes on to talk about the differences between fixed price and time and material work. I believe that this is where the heart of the problem lies.

I know many within the web design industry will disagree with me but I advise in my upcoming book to only work with developers willing to agree to a fix price contract.

There are always exceptions, such as when you have found a developer you know and trust. In such circumstances I suggest the complete opposite. However, generally speaking I don’t believe it should be the client who takes the risk for projects overrunning. Obviously, if the scope is changed by the client then additional work should be priced and agreed (once again on a fixed price contract).

Make sure the scope is clearly defined up front even if it delays the project starting. The tendency is to jump right into development work as soon as possible, especially when deadlines are tight. However, this could cause problems later.

Unfortunately, occasionally you will encounter a developer who agrees to fixed price project only to move the goal posts part way through the project. By this stage it is difficult to walk away. How then do you avoid ending up with this kind of developer?

There are two approaches that work well. First, before engaging a new developer ask to speak with a selection of their existing clients. If possible, contact clients independently of the developer. That way you won’t just get fed a tame client who is bound to say nice things.

Second, for larger projects consider separating off some of the initial work into a smaller self contained project. That way you can ‘try the agency out’ before committing to a larger project with a greater degree of risk.

In answer to the original question, I am sad to say you cannot trust a developers word. You have to put safe guards in place and mitigate the risk.

The life cycle of a website

Richard asks: What is the life cycle of the websites we develop as web designers? Do you see it as a short term year / year and a half, or a longer term two / three years? What kind of time period should we expect to wait before being contacted by a client about a potential redesign?

I would like to challenge two presumptions you make in your question. First, you are presuming sites should be redesigned periodically. Second, you suggest that the client has to come to you. In my opinion, neither are ideal scenarios.

I have written before about how, ideally websites should evolve rather than going through a continual cycle of redesign. I do however accept that this decision lies with the client and not yourself. Nevertheless I would encourage you to work hard at persuading the client of the benefits this approach brings. This serves both your interests as a web designer and those of your client. Throwing out all previous work on a site every couple of years is lunacy and totally unnecessary.

I also have to say that you are doing your clients a disservice by simply waiting for them to contact you. It is your role to continually suggest ideas on how their site could be improved based on emerging innovations.

We offer our clients the opportunity to regularly meet with us (free of charge) to discuss their site and where they should go next. This encourages them to think in terms of evolving their sites. It also ensures the sites do not stagnate and die.

Not that this approach is completely altruistic. By speaking with our
clients regularly we ensure they don’t forget us and increase the likelihood of repeat business.

Do we always take this approach? No. Some clients don’t want us continually pestering them. Some simply cannot afford to move their site forward. In this case we take a more passive role, encouraging them to read this blog or just ‘keep in touch’. However, this is the exception not the rule.

So to answer the original question; I would argue that the life cycle of a website should ideally be indefinite, as it evolves and changes overtime. This happens through a partnership between agency and client.

113. Hiring

Posted in Classic shows on February 27, 2008 by Paul Boag

On show 113: Christian Heilmann on common Javascript mistakes. Marcus talks about hiring new staff and Paul shares his journey into screencasting.

Podcast: Download (29.9MB)

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

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

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

News and events

Highly extensible CSS

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

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

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

Video tools

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

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

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

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

Microformat boost

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

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

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

Feature: Hiring new staff

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

Expert interview: Christian Heilmann on common Javascript mistakes

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

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

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

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

Paul: Um hum…

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

Paul: Yeah…

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

Paul: Um hum…

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

Paul: Yeah.

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

Paul: Umm…

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

Paul: Yeah.

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

Paul: Mmm…

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

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

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

Paul: Um hum…

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

Paul: Yeah.

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

Paul: Mmm hmm…

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

Paul: Mmm…

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

Paul: Mmm…

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

Paul: Mmm…

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

Paul: Mmm…

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

Paul: Mmm…

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

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

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

Paul: (Laughs)

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

Paul: Mmm.

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

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

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

Paul: Mmm…

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

Paul: (Laughs)

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

Paul: Mmm.

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

Paul: Okay.

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

Paul: Oh okay.

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

Paul: Mmm.

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

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

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

Paul: Mmm…

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

Paul: Mmm.

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

Paul: Yeah.

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

Paul: (Laughs)

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

Paul: Um huh.

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

Paul: Yeah.

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

Paul: (Laughs)

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

Paul: Yeah.

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

Paul: Mmm.

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

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

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

Paul: Mmm.

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

Paul: Mmm.

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

Paul: Right.

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

Paul: Mmm.

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

Paul: Yeah.

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

Paul: Mmm hum.

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

Paul: Yeah.

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

Paul: Umm hmm.

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

Paul: Mmm.

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

Paul: (Laughs) …or drinking…

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

Paul: Mmm.

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

Paul: Mmm.

Christian: Otherwise you start preaching to the choir.

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

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

Paul: Okay.

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

Paul: What do you mean by that?

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

Paul: Okay yeah.

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

Paul: Yeah.

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

Paul: Mmm hum.

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

Paul: (Laughs)

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

Paul: (Laughs)

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

Paul: Yeah.

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

Paul: (Laughs)

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

Paul: Yeah.

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

Paul: Yeah.

Christian: And that’s never the case.

Paul: Hmmm.

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

Paul: Mmm hmm.

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

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

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

Paul: Mmm.

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

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

Christian: Yeah.

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

Christian: See you soon. Bye.

Listeners email:

Rolling out new features

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

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

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

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

Here’s the solution I had planned:

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

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

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

Content management and CSS

Our second listener contribution is a question from Adrian…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

HTML snippets

Posted in Development on February 18, 2008 by Paul Boag

If you are part of a web design team or skip constantly between projects, then you might want to consider an alternative approach to writing your HTML.

At Headscape efficiency is king. If you are efficient, you increase profit margins and keep prices competitive. You can only charge as much as the market allows. If you want to increase your profits you need to complete projects faster, while avoiding lowering quality.

As part of our efficiency drive we identified 4 problems…

Designers have to work with each others markup. We all code in different way and this creates a learning curve when a project gets passed between designers.
Integration HTML markup into server side applications was time consuming. Because designers coded in a different way and change their markup for each project, it was time consuming to apply that code to web applications like our in-house content management system.
Designers were constantly reinventing the wheel. Each project was built from the ground up with little reuse of markup across projects.
It was confusing switching between multiple projects. In order to ensure the most efficient use of time, designers are expected to work on several projects simultaneously. Unfortunately, switching between project is confusing because each had different markup.

We required some way to standardise tour markup.

Templating doesn’t work

At first, we produced templates for the different types of pages. For example, we had news listing, text and FAQ templates. Although this worked, they were not very flexible. As soon as the content or functionality began to deviate from the norm the templates had to be heavily customised. This undermined the benefits they provided. They also didn’t allow flexibility of design. Although content and design should be separate, it rarely works that way. Sometimes content needs to be marked up up in a particular order. Other times extra divs are required. The templates didn’t accommodate either scenario.

We needed a more flexible approach.

Using snippets

The solution was HTML snippets. Content such as news listings, forms, navigation and FAQs appear in a vast majority of websites we build. By coding these in a consistent way each time they appear, we solve all of the efficiency problems mentioned above.

Take for example news listings. Most news listings look the same. They have…

Title
date
link
description
and sometimes an image

Because of this consistency you can code in the same way each time. Content will change, each will have its own unique id and sometimes an element might be dropped (e.g. the date or image). However, fundamentally the snippet is consistent

This consistency allows…

A designer picking up the code to instantly understand what is happening.
A developer to quickly integrate it with server side code because the integration is consistent every time.
Pages to be built faster because you are dropping in pre-generated markup

In affect all the designer has to do is build an HTML framework. This consists of the overall containers (main content, secondary content etc.) He then drop snippets into that framework in whatever order he requires.

However, the benefits don’t stop there. You can also associate CSS with each snippet of HTML.

CSS fragments

If your HTML snippets are consistent, you can also build up a library of CSS fragments to support them. Take for example our news listing. Not only does it often contain the same content it is also often laid out in the same way. The image sits to the left while title, date and description sits next to it on the right. Because we know what the markup looks like, we can create this layout as a CSS fragment that can be dropped in whenever this HTML snippet is used.

We are not limited to a single CSS fragment per HTML snippet. Over time you can build up a variety of different CSS layouts for each snippet that can be used as the design dictates.

This approach provides a huge productivity benefit as the HTML and CSS can be built up in a ‘pick and mix’ fashion. However, you can also take the principle one step further and apply it to Javascript.

JavaScript functions

Each HTML snippet can have associated Javascript functions. These can be dropped in just like CSS fragments. These functions carry out common behaviour associated with that HTML snippet.

Take, for example, a FAQ snippet. A common behaviour with this snippet is to only display the answer when a question is clicked. Because we have consistent code in the snippet, it is easy to build a function that works with it and can be dropped in as required. Where possible keep your functions generic and not tied to a particular HTML snippet. However, where that cannot be done, we have standard HTML that allows us to reuse functions across projects with no editing.

Conclusions

In many ways this approach is a cross between microformats and frameworks and so in itself is not groundbreaking. However, from an efficiency standpoint, the impact is overwhelming. Without a doubt it will speed up development times and allow you to turn around projects quicker.

Show 90: Digg

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

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

Podcast: Download (22.1MB)

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

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

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

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

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

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

News and events

Eric Meyer tries to prevent history repeating itself

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

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

“Your browser is not compatible and must be upgraded”

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

“This site is for iPhone users only.”

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

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

6 Keys to Understanding Modern CSS-based Layouts

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

As Jonathan says in his post…

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

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

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

How to mix fonts

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

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

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

Making money through forums

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

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

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

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

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

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

Daniel Burka talks about Digg

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

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

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

Daniel: [laughs]

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

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

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

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

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

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

Paul: Oh okay

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

Paul: Hmmm.

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

Paul: Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

Paul: Hmmm.

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

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

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

Paul: Ummm.

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

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

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

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

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

Paul: Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Paul: Yeah.

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

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

Daniel: [laughs]

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

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

Paul: Ahhh.

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

Paul: Ahhh.

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

Paul: Okay.

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

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

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

Paul: [laughs]

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

Paul: Yeah.

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

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

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

Paul: Sure.

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

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

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

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

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

Paul: [laughs]

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

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

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

Paul: Oh I didn't know that.

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

Paul: Yeah. [laughs]

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

Paul: Yeah

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

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

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

Paul: Yeah.

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

Paul: Yeah.

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

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

Daniel: Right.

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

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

Paul: Cool.

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

Paul: Yeah.

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

Paul: [laughs]

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

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

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

Paul: Yeah.

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

Paul: [laughs]

Daniel: [laughs]

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

Daniel: Shoot! [laughs]

Paul: [laughs]

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

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

Daniel: That would be fun.

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

Daniel: Thanks so much for having me.

Paul’s corner: Quick and dirty competitive analysis

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

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

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

No show next week

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

Show 89: 404

Posted in Classic shows on August 7, 2007 by Paul Boag

On this week’s show: Paul talks about creating the perfect 404 page, Marcus covers some of the basics of rich media and Aral Balkan makes working with databases and APIs a whole lot easier in flash.

Before we dive into today’s show I have a small request from you our loyal fans *cough*. As you may have noticed the show notes we produce for this podcast are a lot more comprehensive than once they were. They are almost a complete transcript, which is important to us because we want the show to be as accessible as possible. I have been contacted by a number of deaf users who are frustrated because they cannot access the show and to be honest I sympathize. We have done our best to produce a complete script but we are getting hung up on the expert section. I just do not have the time to go through and reproduce everything say. An alternative would be to use a service like Casting Words but to be frank I am not confident on the quality we would get back. I was therefore wondering if any of you would like to volunteer? I know a number of people have offered to transcribe in the past but quickly became overwhelmed with the amount of work involved. However, transcribing just this section of the show (typically about 10 minutes) shouldn’t be too bad. Hopefully if we can put a rota together it should be too big a job and best of all you would get to listen to the expert sections in advance :)

So, if you can spare the time drop me a line.

News and events

Writing for the web

First up this week is the fact that the latest issue of A List Apart is entirely dedicated to the subject of writing for the web. There are two great articles both of which are definitely worth reading. The first post takes the idea of personas and suggests that your website too should have a persona. What tone of voice should your website have? What character should it project? The second article (and my personal favorite of the two) is a passionate defense of good writing on the web. It fights hard against the attitude that web copy should be kept to a minimum arguing instead that if the content is web written it draws the user in and engages with them in the same way good design can.

Both articles are excellent and has made me reconsider the importance of good copy. It is an area I am constantly frustrated by and just wish I could get my clients to pay for a copywriter to really bring their sites alive.

Microformats in Google Maps

Next up is a really exciting announcement by Google. It would appear that Google Maps now supports Microformats. I can hear your cries of disappointment… thats not that exciting! Well, I think it is. This is a huge boost for the Microformats community and puts literally millions more hcards out there. Not only will this raise the awareness of Microformats but I also think it will lead to some interesting mashups using the massive database of businesses that are displayed on Google Maps.

If you are yet to play with Microformats or haven’t gotten around to adding them to your website then now is the time. They are quick and easy to implement and oh so very cool ;)

There has been a lot written about Microformats but it is nice to see big players picking it up and running with it. Good stuff.

Corporate Web Standards

What you don’t see a lot written about anymore is web standards. Its almost as if all of the arguments have been made. However, I did come across an article this week that convinced me there was more to cover. It was a discussion about implementing web standards in a large corporate environment where you are weighed down under legacy pages and internal politics.

It was a refreshing article because it was so pragmatic. Much of what you read about standards is bordering on fanatical. This article was much more down to earth accepting that you cannot implement the perfect solution especially within a large corporate environment. It talked about little steps and something being better than nothing.

If you work in a large organisation then this is definitely worth reading. You will find it very encouraging.

Web Design advice

Last up is a couple of websites I have stumbled across this last week. Both of them are provide general web design advice and I have to say both look very impressive. The first was sent to me by Charles Russell who recommended it as an alternative to “The Principles of Beautiful Web Design“. I am not sure it is an alternative personally but it is certainly an interesting website. It is called Web Design from Scratch and does exactly what it says on the tin. It literally covers every aspect of web design providing basic advice and then referring you on elsewhere. Ideal for the beginners.

The other site I wanted to mention is the Web Designers Wall which I believe has only just launched. It seems to be filled with all kinds of nice goodies including tutorials, code snippets, commentary, inspiration and more. What is more the site design is beautiful. I have a feeling that this site is only going to improve with age.

Marcus’ bit: Rich media

Multimedia doesn’t really mean that much anymore I think. It used to refer to CD-Rom type content but now I think it refers to any web content that isn’t just plain old text and images.

I have been pricing up some new/interesting/dynamic content for one of our clients and it struck me that I haven’t discussed this sort of thing here before. I guess there isn’t a great deal of point to this other than ‘have you thought of doing…’, so here goes…

Animated shortcut banners

These seem to be all the rage at the moment. Usually quite a large portion of the homepage is dedicated to a rolling carousel of messages or adverts for content deeper in a site. There will usually be 3 or 4 different ads that flow from one to another. Manual controls are also available to go straight to a particular shortcut or pause on an ad.

There’s a good example at Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust.

Video

I don’t really mean just plain video; I’m referring to a piece we did for the Surrey Hills AONB that incorporated:

Still shots
Video footage
Voiceover

All of which were pulled together to create a tourism video that can be downloaded at Surrey Hills.

The voiceover, incidentally, was done by Surrey Hills patron and famous british actress, Penelope Keith. Going to her rather grand house to record the session was a great experience.

Voiceover

Which brings me nicely on the subject of voiceover. I have two rules relating to voiceover recording:

ALWAYS use a professional actor. The girl in the office with the ‘nice’ voice will sound rubbish, so will the ‘posh’ guy in accounts (we know, we’ve done it!). Voiceover actors aren’t that expensive and, because they’re professional they’re quick. I have used Voicebookers in the past and they have been superb.

Less important but… use a proper voiceover recording studio. I have used studios in London that are really very reasonable and the quality is superb. Though of course this isn’t always possible as with Penelope Keith (recorded my laptop).

Panoramic imagery

We have done a few external 360 degree images, again for Surrey Hills and some for National Trails. We haven’t used dedicated equipment that take full spherical shots basically because you end up with an unnecessary amount of sky. I have simply used a decent camera and tripod and done two full sweeps of portrait images (roughly one just below the horizon, the other just above), moving the camera about 10 degrees each time.

The ‘fun’ part with these images is that they are usually taken from high vantage points so expect to have to do a lot of climbing to out of the way places!

There is a compromise to be made with panoramics. The best time to take a good landscape photo is early in the morning or just before sunset. However, for a panoramic that doesn’t work because you will have the sun in view for a large chunk of the image. This is one of the reasons why panoramic images can often look a little ‘flat’.

Dynamic screensaver

This is quite a cool idea where the standard screensaver idea (pretty pictures rolling from one to the next) is enhanced to allow the client to update information to it. Basically, when the screensaver fires up (as long as it connected to the internet) it checks with the client’s site to see if any changes have been made and automatically updates if there has. This is really handy for news stories but could be used for anything.

Mapping

I think I have discussed mapping previously because it is something Headscape has done a lot of in the past. Up until recently we tended to develop maps using Flash where points of interest are dynamically generated using grid references. We also added features such as layering of different categories.

However, recently we have developed a site for River Thames that utilises Google Maps. The site’s main purpose is to promote the River and encourage people to visit. Again, we have used Google Maps to show points of interest such as places to eat, places to stay etc that are controllable in layers. Using GM is very cool though because the points shown alter when the maps are dragged and/or zoomed (apparently lots of brain power went into making this work!).

Finally, we also created a trip planner or itinerary builder that gives site users the opportunity to list all the places they want to visit (inc. contact details, address, directions etc) and print this off in a print friendly design or email to a friend.

Paul’s corner: Handling missing pages

I noticed this last week that I have been getting a lot of traffic from the Smashing Magazine and so I went to check out where it was coming from. Turns out it was an article on 404 error pages and they had used my error page as an example. The article also referenced another site called the 404 Research Lab that provides lots of good information on setting up custom error pages. All of this reminded me I wrote a blog post ages ago about handling missing pages and yet for some reason i have never spoken about it on the show before. Seems strange because it is a subject we all need to deal with. So, I thought it was time I covered the subject properly using my old blog post as the basis.

Review: Aral Balkan on SWX

Paul Boag: OK, so joining me today is Aral Balkan. Hello! How are you?

Aral Balkan: I’m fine, Paul. How are you doing?

Paul: Not too bad. I feel like I’m speaking to you quite a lot recently, one way or the other.

Aral: [laughs] I know, but it’s fun, huh?

Paul: So I was explaining to everybody earlier in the show how we got you into Headscape to give us a little bit of training and kind of bring us up to speed with what was going on with Flash.

Aral: Yeah, that was a lot of fun, too.

Paul: You had a good day, did you? It wasn’t too painful then.

Aral: Yeah. Me and my bunny had a good day. [laughs]

Paul: Yeah, that was deeply disturbing, on so many levels.

Aral: [laughs]

Paul: But I think we’ll just leave it at that. We won’t tell people any more details on that. We’ll just leave them worrying about it. [laughs]

Aral: OK, let’s do that. [laughs]

Paul: So, as part of that day, you mentioned SWX, which is something that you’ve been involved in developing. And it sounded so cool and kind of dragged my attention back when there were points where I was thinking that this is beginning to get a bit out of depth to me.

Aral: [laughs]

Paul: There were techie people in the room that understood what was going on.

Aral: Yeah.

Paul: But then you started talking about SWX, and I started to think, “Ooh, that sounds cool” so I thought I’d get you on the show and ask you a little bit about it.

Aral: That’s great. That’s great, because SWX is what I’m most excited about these days.

Paul: Good stuff. So, do you want to kick us off by telling us a little bit about what SWX is?

Aral: Well, SWX is a couple of things. SWX itself is a new data format for Flash. It’s actually the native data format for Flash, which is kind of weird, because Flash has been around for a while, so why hasn’t it had a native data format until this point? I don’t know. Nobody else did it, so at the end; I was like, “OK. Well, I guess I have to bite the bullet here.”

And when I say native data format, if you’re not very fluent with Flash, think about JSON, or what JSON is for JavaScript. But it’s actually a step beyond that, because, with JSON, you still either have to parse it, or in JavaScript you have to evaluate it, before you can use it. So there’s another step before you can use it, after the data’s loaded.

In SWX, there isn’t. It uses SWF files, which are native Flash files, to store data, so it makes it very easy to work with.

Paul: What’s the kind of target audience for this? Who do you see as using it?

Aral: There are a couple. So, anyone right now who’s working with Flash basically can use this to build mash-ups, to build data-driven Flash applications. And also, mobile developers who are developing with Flash Lite can use SWX to develop mobile Flash applications.

And in fact, that’s where it’s currently, I think, most useful, because with SWX RPC–which is the remote procedure call, the gateway for it–you can make remote procedure calls, so call back-end services and methods, through SWX. And it’s the only RPC solution, really, because Flash Remoting doesn’t work on Flash mobile, on Flash Lite, so it’s the only RPC solution for mobile right now.

Paul: I think what kind of struck me about it was the fact that there are a lot of people out there that maybe have been doing some superficial stuff with Flash…

Aral: Yeah.

Paul: And have been doing some ActionScript and things like that.

Aral: Right.

Paul: But when it gets to things like making data calls, it all seems to get horribly complicated, all of a sudden.

Aral: It does. It gets very hairy, and I don’t know why. I think part of it is because the back-end, the server side, of applications has traditionally been the realm of traditional programmers: the brainiacs, the people who are very comfortable talking in code, thinking in code.

And they’re not always the best people, I find, to simplify concepts, because they’re so intelligent, they can understand all of this, or they have such a focus on this that they don’t mind spending hours trying to set something up. Sometimes, they’re not always the best people to create simpler systems for mere mortals like the rest of us.

Paul: [laughs]

Aral: So that was my main motivation behind it, because I think Flash is great for building mash-ups and data-driven applications. But we don’t get as much experimentation in Flash with that, and I think it’s because it’s too hard. The barrier of entry is too high. You have to jump through so many hoops to get even something basic working, whereas it should just be, off the bat, you should be able to get started with things. And that’s been my focus with SWX.

So, for example, on the Mac, there’s a bundle that you can download that gives you everything you need to start using SWX, with a one-click installer, a disk image.

Paul: Cool.

Aral: My focus, really, with SWX is on simplicity. And when I say simplicity, I mean for the whole process, from the moment you go on the website and download SWX, to the moment you can get up and running. I’m trying to make that whole process as easy as possible, basically.

Paul: From what you showed me when you came into Headscape…

Aral: Yeah.

Paul: Basically, within a few minutes, you can kind of download this bundle onto my Mac. I can run an install file, which sets everything up for me.

Aral: Yeah.

Paul: And you’ve even set up…

Aral: Well, you basically get a development server for free.

Paul: Yeah.

Aral: It uses the MAMP Bundle, which is a great bundle that has Apache, PHP, MySQL. So if you’ve ever been afraid to work with these things, that’s also a way to get started, because there they are on your machine, running, without any configuration or anything on your part.

Paul: And you have also included some kind of interfaces to common APIs, things like Flickr and Twitter and stuff.

Aral: Yes, and in fact, if you remember the installation process and everything that you were talking about, you don’t even have to download and install SWX to start working with the pre-existing APIs that come with it, because I host an instance of the SWX gateway on swxformat.org. It’s the public SWX gateway that you can just hit directly from your Flash applications.

Paul: Ah!

Aral: So if you don’t want to mess with the back-end, but say you want to build a mash-up that uses Flickr or Twitter, currently two of the main APIs that I have on there, you don’t even have to download SWX. You can just open up Flash, write four or five lines of code, and get, for example, the list of your latest photos from Flickr.

Paul: Cool.

Aral: Or your friends’ photos. With nothing else. So you don’t even have to download anything to start working with SWX, because it is native. What you’re getting from the back-end, from that SWX gateway, is a SWF, and Flash knows how to deal with that, and the data in there is a native Flash object and ready for you to use the moment it loads.

Paul: So, how does somebody get started on this? Where do they go? What do they have to do? Especially, you made it sound very simple for the Mac. Is it horribly complicated if you’re a Windows user?

Aral: Oh, not at all, not at all. Like I said, regardless or what platform you’re on, unless you want to build your own server-side services, if you want to use the APIs that it comes with, you don’t even have to download it, actually.

Paul: Oh, OK.

Aral: In fact, just last week, I got moo cards printed. And these little moo cards have all the code you need on the back of them, because there’s only about four lines of text you can put on the back.

Paul: [laughs]

Aral: But they have all the code you need to get the latest public timeline updates from Twitter. So it’s actually, seriously, four lines of code, and it fits on a moo card.

Paul: Wow!

Aral: So, to get started, you don’t have to do anything, really, apart from open up Flash, write four lines of code, and see it run and get the feeling that, “Wow, maybe I can build data-driven applications in Flash, too, because this is simple.”

The next step would be to download SWX onto your own machine. If you have a development server already, if you have a web server with PHP, then you just download the ZIP file, unzip it into your web root, and hit that location in the browser, and the start page comes up and guides you through the rest of it.

Paul: Cool.

Aral: If you’re on a Mac, get the MAMP Bundle, and that’ll get you started even faster. But, like I said, you don’t even need to download anything to start playing with it.

Paul: So these four lines of code to get you going…

Aral: Yeah.

Paul: If they don’t have one of your precious mood cards, where can they go to learn those kind of basics?

Aral: Well, on swxformat.org, there is a screencast right now. It runs you through the MAMP Bundle, but the concepts are exactly the same for all of the rest.

Paul: OK.

Aral: Although, I am going to record a few more screencasts. I’ve started putting them up on Viddler, which is actually really cool. I don’t know if you’re used it.

Paul: Yeah, I have.

Aral: But it’s really great for screencasts, because it keeps the original resolution of your movie. So I’m going to record quite a few more and put them up there, including one that will just get you started, like the moo card does.

Paul: Cool.

Aral: So, look on swxformat.org. And also, look on my blog, because I blog about SWX quite often there: it is aralbalkan.com.

Paul: So as I understand it, at the moment, this is all built on PHP and MySQL. Is that going to change? Are we going to see other platforms supporting this, too?

Aral: Well, basically, the SWX format itself is a data format, so it’s platform-agnostic, in terms of the back-end, etcetera. So if you have a SWX SWF, you’ll be able to load that. Even if it’s offline, if you have if on your hard drive, you’ll be able to load it into Flash and get the data off of it.

Paul: Excellent.

Aral: And then there’s SWX RPC, which is an implementation of a gateway, basically, or an endpoint, that serves SWX SWFs. And the current implementation of that is only in PHP.

Paul: Right.

Aral: So, it will be ported later on. It’s currently in beta. And once we get closer to the release date and certain things are standardized, I’m going to be concentrating on orchestrating the ports. There’s a lot of interest from quite a few people to port it to Ruby, to J2EE, to.NET.

Paul: Excellent.

Aral: And my focus right now is on getting SWX to a level where it’s somewhat of a standard–not like an Internet standard, but at least, within itself, we know what we’re talking about when we say a SWX SWF so that, if it’s being generated from Ruby, it’s the same thing…

Paul: Yeah.

Aral: So there’s no fragmentation. That’s my focus right now. In fact, I’m writing my first RFC…

Paul: [laughs]

Aral: For the SWX formats, just so things are a bit more standardized, before we go porting it to every possible technology.

Paul: Excellent! That just sounds really exciting…

Aral: I’m really excited about it!

Paul: Yeah, I bet you are.

Aral: This has gotten me excited and working with technology again, at a level that I hadn’t been in the past. It’s fun. Because this stuff, the data exchange between tiers, it’s really not rocket science, and it shouldn’t be rocket science. We’re just moving stuff from one place to another. And my philosophy is: make that as simple as possible for people so they can concentrate on the really fun bits…

Paul: Yeah.

Aral: Building the user interface, building a great user experience. Because those are the hardest bits, really, conceptually, and they’re also the most fun.

Paul: Yeah. That’s great stuff, and I wish you all the best with it in the future. And thanks for coming on the show and telling us a little bit about it.

Aral: Thanks so much, Paul, for having me. It was a lot of fun.

Paul: Yeah. OK. Good to talk to you, and we’ll speak to you again soon.

Aral: OK, take care of yourself.

Show 78: POSH?

Posted in Classic shows on May 8, 2007 by Paul Boag

This week on Boagworld: Paul redesigns the way clients and designers interact, Marcus asks if you really need a content management system, and Garrett Dimon sharings his experiences of information architecture.

News and events

Breadcrumbs are good, its official

When Jakob Nielsen speaks the world listens. This week he has come out with the shocking revelation that Breadcrumbs are good. Okay, so this doesn’t come as a surprise to most of us, but its still an interesting read. Apparently more and more people have come to rely on this secondary navigation tool and notice if it isn’t there. Jakob believes that breadcrumbs never cause problems in user testing (although sometimes they are not seen) and provide a wealth of benefits to visitors that do use them. Finally, he goes on to talk about the fact that breadcrumbs should always show a sites hierarchy rather than the path a user has taken through a site.

Techcrunch drool over Silverlight

So the guys over at Techcrunch have spent the last week at MIX07 and seem to have been brainwashed by the nice fellows at Microsoft. They are positively drooling over Silverlight, Microsoft’s challenge to Flash. In one post they say:

“It makes Flash/Flex look like an absolute toy… without exaggeration, Ajax looks like a bicycle next to a Ferrari when compared to Silverlight”

Personally, I haven’t had a chance to look at Silverlight yet so cannot express much of an opinion. However, I find it hard to believe that Silverlight will topple Flashes dominance before Adobe responds with something equally impressive.

Although competition can never be a bad thing, it strikes me that this is yet another plugin for people to download and another platform we have to worry about developing for.

RSS in plain english

RSS can be a difficult concept to get your head around the first time you encounter it. Its still a good idea to explain what RSS is on your site for those that don’t know. Obviously you can create a page yourself explaining or sometimes I link to the BBC website which provides an excellent description. Of course if you want something a little more exciting you might want to link to this superb video that explains exactly what RSS is and how it works. Its just a shame they don’t offer the option to embed it directly into your own site.

How POSH are you?

I have to say I was very cynical about this news story when I first encountered it but after hearing Jeremy Keith’s argument on the last .net podcast I have to say I am coming around. POSH is yet another another “catchy” web acronym. It stands for “plain old semantic HTML”. So why do we need yet another acronym? Well the argument goes that nobody is getting excited about semantic HTML these days. Its just not cool. Instead we are obsessed with Microformats or AJAX, things that are perceived as being “in” and “trendy”. The POSH acronym is designed to get us talking about semantic HTML again. The idea is that we start blogging about how we mark stuff up and sharing ideas with one another. The example Jeremy gave on the show was; what is the best way to mark up a conservation in HTML? He suggested that it was simply an ordered list of blockquotes. Do you put that much thought into your code? I can’t say I always do.

So with that in mind I have opened a new section on the Boagworld forum where you can post your examples of good code. You can ask questions like; what is the best way to markup… or simply post how you choose to markup different elements. Whatever the case lets start sharing our good practice in HTML.

Client corner: Do you really need a CMS

Apart from a few ‘design only’ projects we get involved in, every tender that comes through the door includes the words “control over content is a must have”… or words to that effect.

But thinking about all the ‘full’ CMS based projects we have delivered, is that really what the client wanted/needed?

So what types of CMS solutions are there? Here’s a quick summary:

Limited CMS (non-structural) e.g.

News
Events
Popular a few years ago when ‘full’ CMS was a much more expensive.
Pros – simple to understand (and build)
Cons – clients tend to request more and more areas of the site become CMS controlled and you can end up with a bit of a mess and the cost of replacing can be prohibitive.

Blogging tools

Article based
With commenting

Full CMS

Control over structure: move pages, edit pages, create news pages (and sections) and the front end navigation updates automatically
Usually modular: news, events, downloads, forms (dynamic), lists, newsletter, etc
User management: Roles, permissions, preview, workflow
Licensed or bespoke?

You need to ask yourself a couple of fundamental questions:

Even if I have these tools, will I have time to use them? All websites need to have an owner or editor. Someone who’s job it is to manage all content sources and keep the site up to date. We have been asked many times to carry out work content population work on a CMS that we built…

How much of my content needs updating more than monthly and how often do I need to add new pages to my site? It seems that having the ability to extend a site is often seen as a ‘must have’ when in reality new pages are only added, say, quarterly at most. Added to that, the only content that changes regularly is, for example, news, events and case studies. Employing an agency to add new pages and manage site structure/navigation is not a big job (though some seem to charge extortionate rates). Added to that, clients who do not use a CMS very often tend to forget how to use it and then go back to the agency simply because of that.

To summarise, think very carefully about your requirements in this area and talk to prospective agencies about what they recommend. You could end up making a costly mistake.

Ask the expert: Garrett Dimon on Information Architecture

I am a huge fan of Garrett Dimon’s work and so I am really excited to have him on the show this week. Garrett’s job title is “information architect” and so unsuprisingly he joins us to share some of his experiences on working with information architecture. His advice includes:

Embrace constraints
Know when to challenge the constraints
Explore lots of ideas
Work in conjunction with clients
Don’t use your computer
Throw away more than you keep
Don’t worry about the details until later on
Simplify and cut back on details
Communicating is more important than documentation
Make your IA deliverables visual as they are easier to understand

Agony uncle: The wish list brief

This week I am back on Agony Uncle duty with an email from Dan in Swansea:

I am increasingly frustrated by the briefs I am getting through from potential clients. They read more like wishlists than real briefs. They lack focus and often ask for functionality they just don’t need. How do you respond to briefs like that?

Its a great question and set me thinking a lot about the web design process. In fact it was the primary motivation for a recent blog post on the subject which we talk about on the show. I think the key to this question is to not be afraid to go back to the client and challenge them. Perhaps propose a rough costing based on some of the items in their list but suggest that the first step (if you are taken on) would be to define and price a more accurate brief. I think most clients will respect you for suggesting an alternative and more effective strategy. In many ways its like the speculative design argument, it may feel scary to challenge the client before anything is signed but in my experience clients respond positively to a carefully thought through argument.

Review: Spoken Text

A while back I asked people to submit their own reviews. I didn’t specify that people couldn’t review their own product and so I recently received a review from Mark promoting Spoken Text. Now, I don’t want to open the flood gates to shameless self promotion but I like spoken text so much that I want to include it on the show. It is basically a free, text to speech system that allows you to convert multiple file types into audio files.

Mark shares four great reasons why he thinks we might be interested in it as web designers:

Use spoken text to provide alternative audio versions of the content on your website
Allow users to record and save any content from your website they want
Create a podcast of your websites content
Create your own podcast of other people’s content that you want to listen to while on the go

There are two things that excite me most about this service (beyond the fact that it is free). First is the accessibility benefits it could bring for visually impaired users and secondly the ability to make instant podcasts of new stories from your site without the complication of finding somebody to present it.

This isn’t a service that is useful to everyone but I think in certain circumstances this could be a killer app.

Excited about client work

Posted in News on April 12, 2007 by Paul Boag

I don’t talk much about the client work we produce at Headscape, but I am really excited about our latest site and so wanted to share a few thoughts about it with you.

We won the work at least partly due to the boagworld podcast, which in itself is an encouraging start. It proves that guerilla marketing really works and also, clients we win via the podcast tend to be more switch on to the web and our way of working.

The job was to redesign the Visit Thames website from the ground up. New content management system, IA, content, design… everything. It was a big job and a very tight timescale. In fact the deadline was so tight that we initially turns the project down. This is something that we have often talked about doing on the podcast but is hard to do in real life. However, our strategy of not committing ourselves to the impossible proved correct and the client agreed to move the deadline back just enough to get us onboard.
Despite the new deadline this has always been a very tight project and there is still a lot still to do on the site. However, the initial version is a massive improvement on the old site and I wanted to tell you about a few of the cool things we have done.

AJAX goodness

One thing I like about this site is that it uses AJAX and JavaScript but doesn’t rely too heavily on it. The client side code enhances the user experience rather than being an integral part. You can give feedback or send to a friend without leaving the page you were visiting. You can add items to your itinerary without reloading. You can get ideas for trips without jumping from page to page. In short the site implements the principles of progressive enhancement and HIJAX.

Kick ass content management

There are also loads of content management facilities that unfortunately we cannot show you. We have made significant modifications to our in-house content management code base allowing site administrators to do all kinds of cool stuff. Functionality includes:

Permission and workflows
Geocoding points of interest using Google Maps (like Google My Map)
Building up pages from a huge number of modular elements
Building and managing your own forms
Comprehensive reports on all site forms
Personalized dashboard
Powerful image library allowing basic image editing
The ability to create your own domain shortcuts to specific pages
Content expiry alerts

The list goes on and on. All of this is built on .net, which may not be the trendiest language in the world but certainly proved hugely powerful and flexible for our requirements. Another nice technical aspect is the fact that the majority of data is stored as XML rather than in a rigid database table. This allows huge flexibility in the management and organization of data.

Google Maps on steroids

One of the primary functions of the new site was the ability for users to find points of interest, which they may wish to visit when spending a day on the Thames. In total the client had 15000 points of interest that he wanted to give users access to. Not only did the user need to know basic information on these points, he also needed to know geographically where they were. The obvious conclusion was to plot them on Google maps.

Of course the biggest problem with Google maps is that it isn’t very accessible. We therefore also wanted to show the points as a list in addition to plotting them on a map. Our other concern was that it became obvious very quickly that even plotting a fraction of 15000 points was going to create serious performance problems.

Using a big blob of AJAX goodness we managed to overcome both of these problems. Basically, each time the map loads we grab the boundaries of the map and call back to the server, only loading in points that appear within those boundaries. Every time you drag the map it calls back and gets a new set of points. Users that don’t have JavaScript enabled can still use a traditional search option to return points based on postcode or place name. Try it for yourself and see what I mean.

Now, the system isn’t perfect. There is a delay each time you drag (although to be honest most of the time is spent calling back to Google) and we have had to limit the zoom level to stop too many points being called back. However, we are working on ways to improve this and it is still a pretty unique solution.

Task focused functionality

Right from the outset we wanted to focus on the primary goal of most visitors to the site, which was to discover places to visit. If you are spending a long weekend on the Thames for example you might want to find:

Somewhere to stay
Places to visit
Some nice places to eat out

It quickly became apparent that what users needed to do was build an itinerary of points of interest. What is more they needed to print those out in a nicely formatted way including a map to show where those points are.

By concentrating on this primary objective the site has a nicely focused feel, making it much easier to use.

Microformats to boot

Okay, so the code isn’t the cleanest we have ever produced but making the design fluid and scalable with font resizing proved tricky in places. However, all of the points of interest are marked up as Microformats which will allow us to do some cool stuff in future such as downloading them as vcards or integrating them with other systems.

The future

Of course like any site that you produce, all we can see are the bugs and problems. However, I am excited about this site because it has some really cool features and we have a client who is planning for the future. We have some great new things coming soon, which should improve the user experience even further. Oh yes, and it has Poirot sharing his passion for the Thames. Nice.

Show 62: Glitches

Posted in Classic shows on January 8, 2007 by Paul Boag

This week we discuss handling difficult requests from clients, the upcoming boagworld meetup and when to redesign your site. Jeremy Keith also shares his thoughts on when and where to implement Microformats.

Podcast: Download (18.1MB)

Digg this podcast

News & events

Marcus and I cover four news stories this week:

Boagworld Meetup

There is going to be a meetup of boagworld listeners in central London on the 25th January. If you fancy joining us then please sign up on the upcoming.org website.

WebDD Conference

On Saturday the 3rd of February 2007 Microsoft are holding a free conference in Reading specifically targeting web developers and web designers in the United Kingdom. Speakers include Patrick Lauke and Bruce Lawson. To sign up visit the WebDD site.

Web Directions North

The Web Directions conference comes to Vancouver between the 6th and 10th of February. The line up is absolutely superb. If you are on that side of the Atlantic I would highly recommend making the effort to attend. More information on the Web Directions North site.

Now you can digg podcasts

Digg.com now offers a great way to find new podcasts. The service is still in Beta so site registration is required, however you can view the most popular podcasts, see what comments people have made and even vote for your own favourite podcast (hint! hint!).

Agony Uncle

The agony uncle section is a new part of the show where we encourage you the listeners to write in with your web design problems. In this week’s show I tackle a forum post by Amorphic that asks how to deal with clients that want ridiculous things on their website. I look at avoiding confrontation, understanding the clients’ requests, and how to justify your position.

Review

Each week we are going to review a book, article, product or conference and this week we look at an article by Jason Santa Maria on working with corporate colours. It’s an excellent article found on the 24 ways website and I highly recommend you take the time to read it.

Client’s corner

In the new client’s corner segment Marcus discusses the unique challenges faced by website owner. This week he starts with the basics… how do you know when to redesign your website. This topic is largely based on an article about redesigning I wrote a while back, so you might want to check that out.

Ask the expert

As part of the new structure we are asking you the listener to send in a question that you would like posed to a web design guru. This week I pose a question I have been having about how to implement Microformats to Jeremy Keith.

Podcast 56: To implement or not?

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

We look at how to decide what techniques and technologies to implement on your site and what should motivate your decision making process.

Podcast: Download (23.9MB)

Despite the obscure title, this week’s show is very relevant to everybody involved in web design. We look at how to decide what techniques and technologies to implement on your site and what should motivate your decision making process.

The business of web design

Web design has become incredibly complicated over the last few years. From accessibility to standards and AJAX to Microformats, there are a plethora of techniques and technologies vying for our attention.

With so many things to consider when developing a website how do you decide what to include and what to leave out. Each of us needs to decide where to draw the line in areas like accessibility, usability and standards.

I have written a lot around this subject because it is something that I am particularly passionate about . This week’s show is largely based around these posts so you might want to check them out.

Return on Investment

Success criteria

It is also a subject I will be exploring further at the upcoming Refresh 06 and Web 2 live conferences.

Also in the show…

Also in this week’s show we discuss whether you should give clients the right to reuse your code and whether blogs should have comments enabled or not.

We also cover the swift adoption of IE7, the new Google site search tool and a fascinating article introducing geeks to the world of marketing.

~~Finally, we encourage everybody to plant a pin in our boagworld map, which shows the location of all our listeners worldwide.~~

Podcast 52: Javascript Libraries

Posted in Classic shows on October 2, 2006 by Paul Boag

This week on boagworld.com we talk to Dustin Diaz about Javascript libraries, discuss other web design podcasts, launch our web design forum and help you get started with Microformats.

Podcast: Download (30.1MB)

In the news

Microformats

If you are interested in getting started with Microformats then check out the excellent ebook on Microformats by
Brian Suda
. He has also been kind enough to share a Microformats cheat sheet for free.

Microsoft and the BBC

This week saw an announcement by Microsoft and the BBC that they are exploring ways of developing [the BBCs] digital services. As you can see the announcement is somewhat lacking in details. However, this is potentially a huge development and could lead to some interesting online services.

Searching rich media

This year’s demo conference saw pluggd announce an amazing new feature that allows you to search inside of podcasts. This is symptomatic of a growing movement to ensure that rich media content is searchable. Other players in this space include Veotag and Podzinger.

Questions and comments

This week’s show included two excellent audio questions from listeners.

The first was about the open source forum software I mentioned a few weeks back called Vanilla. This led to a discussion about running online communities, the integration of Vanilla and my hopes for the new boagworld forum.

The second question was about what other podcasts I would recommend. Below are the list of the one’s I mentioned on the show. However, you can find a more comprehensive list of web design podcasts by going here.

Main feature

The main feature today is an interview with
Dustin Diaz
about Javascript libraries. Javascript is becoming increasingly important as web designers produce ever more powerful web applications. But, how do Javascript libraries fit in? Do they enable rapid development or are they simply a crutch for those that can’t be bothered to learn the language?

Review

There are so many great website applications around these days, many of which allow you to add their functionality to your own site through web services and APIs. The problem is that it is hard to discover what exactly is available. This week on boagworld we review three sites that help you do exactly that:

Podcast 47: The mobile web

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

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

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

Beginning JavaScript with DOM Scripting and Ajax

The mobile web

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

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

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

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

Also on this week’s show

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

We review two books on this week’s show:

Web Accessibility: Web Standards and Regulatory Compliance

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

Refresh Keynote

Posted in News on July 23, 2006 by Paul Boag

A number of people have asked me what I will be speaking on at the upcoming Refresh conference. Well, now you know.

The Refresh site now includes a schedule and description of the topics covered.

From folksonomy and web standards to accessibility and microformats, the web is full of new techniques and philosophies. But how can all of these new approaches to web design be applied to real projects for real clients that are constrained by tight budgets and tighter deadlines?

I am assuming that the majority of people at the conference don’t work for Yahoo or Google and aren’t going to be running some "trendy" web 2.0 company. My guess is that most will work for agencies or are in house designers within some large organisation. They will be dealing with the development of "traditional" sites, which are more marketing & sales focused rather than application led.

With this in mind, I want to talk about how to take some of the emerging technologies and apply them in a more traditional setting. We will cover, balancing the desire to integrate the latest "cool technology" with the business needs of the organisation you are working with. In short we will be looking at how to be pragmatic.

If you have any specific issues you would like to see covered (whether you can make the conference or not, as I am sure they will podcast the event) then add a comment and I will see what I can do.

Podcast 40: atMedia – Applying the lessons learnt

Posted in Classic shows on June 26, 2006 by Paul Boag

Paul and Marcus discuss the recent atMedia conference on web design. How do the subjects covered by the leading lights in web design apply in the real world, on websites that don’t have limitless budgets and funky web 2.0 functionality.

Podcast: Download (30.5MB)