Tag Archives: mobile

Show 91: God Bless America

Posted in Classic shows on by Paul Boag

On this week’s show: Paul gets to grips with the fact that the whole world isn’t British, Marcus explains how to deal with the client from hell and Julie Howell shares her expertise on accessibility

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News and events | Dealing with the client from hell | The international web | Julie Howell on Accessibility

News and events

There are tons of news stories which have sprung up since I last recorded a show. In fact I have spent all morning wading through my RSS feeds. Unfortunately as always I can only squeeze a few into the show so you will have to check out my delicious feed for the rest.

Gerry McGovern on Intranets

The first story I wanted to mention is a couple of posts by Gerry McGovern concerning intranets. I am constantly getting emails asking for me to talk about intranets on the show but somehow have never gotten around to it. Fortunately Gerry has and if you are somebody who works on intranet sites then you should take the time to check them out.

The first, tackles the basic problem of how to get senior management engaged with the intranet. Gerry observes that generally speaking management don’t consider the intranet an important asset to the business and so the site never gets the backing it deserves and requires. In the post he suggests the solution is in how the intranet is portrayed to management and goes on to propose a better approach.

The second article Gerry has posted on intranets is a breakdown of a report on what staff really want from their intranet. Basically, staff overwhelmingly want a better organized intranet where they can quickly find people, policies and procedures, and forms.

Gerry goes on to look at the numbers behind this conclusion and links to a summary of the results in PDF form.

SXSW Panel Picker

Probably the biggest web design news since I have been away is that SXSW have launched their annual panel picker. For those of you who do not know, SXSW is the biggest web design conference of the year and takes place in Austin Texas. The massive event has democratized their selection of panels by opening it up for you to vote on.

By going to the SXSW panel picker you can browse over 680 suggested panels and vote for the ones you like the look of most. Although this sounds great in principle, as Andy Budd points out, it can turn into a popularity contest for the speakers and not necessarily an assessment of the quality of the subjects.

That said, I need you to all vote for the three panels I am associated with whether you think they are any good or not! I don’t even care if you are attending SXSW or not, just get on the site and vote. Hell, I have crafted this podcast lovingly for you every week for over two years the least you can do is vote for me :)

Seriously though, I am hoping to be on three panels (yes I know this overkill) and am really excited as it is my first year speaking at the conference.

My panels are:

Hopefully at least one of these will come off.

HTML characters lookup

My next news item that I wanted to mention is a useful little tool which has recently been launched. I love this tool because it solves a really simple problem in a very easy to use way. Basically all it does is allow you to look up the HTML code you need to include ampersands, spaces or other characters which need to be escaped.

Let me explain the problem in case you don’t know what I am talking about. In HTML certain characters are reserved for use in the code. For example if you type an & it will interpret that as code and not text. It is therefore necessary to code up these characters in a special way. This online tool will tell you exactly how to do that.

You simply type in the character you wish to use and it returns the code you have to use. The site uses AJAX so results return incredibly quickly and if you are a mac user you can even download a dashboard widget.

Very useful indeed.

Moving from Print to the web

My final new story for today is some help for you print designers out there who are struggling to make the transition to the web. It is not always an easy process not just because of learning the technical side but also the mental shift involved.

Well, if that is you I would like to make two suggestions. First up, I would like to recommend an article I came across that takes you through the process of moving from print to the web. Its extremely good and makes some excellent recommendations about where to start.

Secondly, you might want to think about getting some training on CSS and XHTML. There are a number of courses out there but if you are UK based I would like to particularly recommend a beginners CSS course being run by Rachel Andrews and Drew McLellan. These guys are both experts in their field and they have a session coming up in October. Of course this course is ideal for anybody starting out with CSS, not just print designers!

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Marcus’ bit: Dealing with the client from hell

Found this rather frustrated boagworlder (Cadore) in the forum – read on&#…;

Hello everyone, I was wondering if I could get some feedback on how to proceed with a problematic client.

I have a small business client who contacted me about a website. After talking with her she decided she wanted a basic two column layout with some navigation, she would provide language, etc. All was good, but here is the main problem: I design the header or banner, whichever you call it, and she says it looks great, she loves it. Then we move onto the navigation, she likes the navigation, but now the header seems “too busy” – take a step back. One thing that cracks me up is she said in emails she wants to have a large amount of leaves throughout the design. So, I incorporate leaves and she says she is thinking of not having any leaves at all now. It’s like she wants to do the design for me? Me designer – you client. Do you understand what I am saying, every step forward she wants to go a step back. Now she has a problem with the navigation, and the background image, that she has loved and hated 4 times already. Does anyone have any advice how to deal with a client like this. I was thinking of having her sign off on every little things, but this doesn’t make for a happy working relationship. Any advice on you have proceeded with a client like this would be appreciated.

I have talked loads about getting contracts in place, making sure everything’s agreed up front etc etc. But, agreeing on the look and feel of a site is not so easy to nail down before you start working on a project.

Certainly do all of the following before you start:

  • Find out who will be signing off the design.
  • Encourage the client to make this as small a group as possible.
  • Talk to these people. Obviously, talk to them about project specifics (see below) but try to get to know them a bit. Get an idea whether they’re conservative in their outlook, arty, whacky&#…; whatever. I remember seeing a panel at SXSW where a Swedish creative director said that he insisted on getting drunk with his clients before starting the job&#…; there is some wisdom in that!
  • As them for examples of favourite sites, particularly in their sector. Ask them why they like them.
  • Ask them for any other marketing material that they have, particularly items they like.
  • Discuss their brand (even if it’s just their logo) and the importance of continuity. Make sure that you are aware of any limitations.
  • Discuss colours.
  • Discuss imagery. Ask for imagery that you can use.
  • Discuss layout.
  • Finally, when you’re discussing these items, make sure that you provide examples, choices, potential solutions etc. Your client is almost certainly not an expert web designer therefore they need ideas from you; alternatives if you like.
  • However, you must explain why you’re recommending a particular idea. You need to communicate that you are an expert. This is actually the crux of the problem I think. Successful designers communicate their ideas before they ‘put pen to paper’ and provide solid reasoning for their choices afterwards.

Summarise all of your discussions in an email. Insist that they agree (or not) upon all of the points in the email before you start.
Ok, so that’s all done, now you have a choice:

Limited iterations

This is when you say to the client:

‘Ok, we will put together a design concept for you. You can come back to us with any modifications/comments once that will be incorporated into the design concept, anything after that is chargeable’.

I think this works well for small client, low budget work because everyone knows where they stand and possibly expectations are lower. Also, constantly going back over a design can affect the bottom line of a small project a lot more than a big technical project.

Averaging things out

The problem with this approach is that it can piss off your clients. You can end up looking petty or, even worse, you can end up making changes for free after the agreed cut off point (“it was only a 10 minute job”)&#…;

The approach that we have ended up with at Headscape takes the view that clients won’t pay time and materials for design concept work (they need a fixed price), so we have estimated what we think the average time spent on this work and charge that to all clients. This price is per concept but effectively allows unlimited mods to that concept. If a client wants multiple concepts then they pay accordingly.

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Paul’s corner: The international web

Just before I went on holiday last week I posted an entry on boagworld. On my return I was gob-smacked to see it had generated the most comments of any post I have ever added to my site.

The whole thing started with an email I received from a first time listener to the show. He was complaining about a joke I made at the expense of my american listeners. Those who listen to the show regularly will know that this is not uncommon and this listener felt the comments were inappropriate. I posted a throw away line on twitter about this and accidently started a debate on political correctness and international differences. Overnight I found myself thinking a lot about the subject and this lead to a blog post on the international web.

I started by apologizing if my humor caused any offense but the main thrust of the article was looking at the broader issues of engaging with an international audience. I found the challenges of working across multiple cultures fascinating and felt it applied to all aspects of web design (not just podcasts).

However, unfortunately the majority of comments I received focused on the apology rather than the points I was trying to raise. I really appreciated the encouragement found in the comments but would like to come back to this issue of culture and cultural differences when designing for the web. This is a challenge that we all face and I want to cover the 5 points I mentioned in my blog post again for the sake of those of you who do not read my blog.

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Ask the expert: Julie Howell on Accessibility

Paul:
Today I’ve been fortunate enough to grab a few minutes of Julie Howell’s time. Julie is the director of accessibility at a digital design agency called Fortune Cookie and is also the former digital policy development manager at the Royal National Institute for the Blind. She has also been involved, I believe if this is right Julie, that you were involved as the technical author for the PAS-78 or do you call it P.A.S 78?

Julie:
It’s pronounced PAS. Also RNIB is for Royal National Institute of Blind People if you want to…

Paul:
Oh, I missed out the People didn’t I. Oh well, there you go.

Julie:
Well it’s a recent change anyway.

Paul:
Ah, it’s to keep me guessing. Anyway good to have you on the show.

Julie:
Thank you.

Paul:
And obviously, unsurprisingly we have Julie in here to talk about accessibility [laughs]. You know, it’s kinda a no-brainer really. So I thought the best place to start is, well Julie, it strikes me, and I know a lot of the people that listen to our show, that the world of web accessibility seems to be a bit of a mess at the moment. We’ve kinda got WCAG2 that seems to be taking forever to come out. We’ve got now this thing called the WCAG Samurai, what’s all that about? They seem to be in competition with WCAG2. Then whenever you go into or if you are brave enough to venture onto an accessibility forum, they all seem to be fighting over tiny details and you are terrified to say anything incase you get jumped over. Do you think that accessibility is in trouble and if so, what can it do to dig itself out of the hole? What can the accessibility community do?

Julie:
You know, I don’t think there’s as big a problem as is being suggested. I think that what you have to keep in mind is perspective and context. There is heated debate on some areas of the web about accessibility, how accessibility will change or how the guidance might change moving forward in the great big wide world of web design. But in the much bigger world of commercial companies posting content on the web, there isn’t that concern. Everything seems quite stable. It doesn’t worry me at all that the techies or the geeks, and I mean that in the nicest possible way, are having heated debate because it’s really important. That’s how things change and improve and move forward. What is important is that we as people who are part of what I call the accessibility movement, who care about accessibility and who care about the lot of disabled people, keep presenting consistent guidance to the people who really can make the difference to disabled people. That’s businesses who are putting their services onto the web. The fact that there is heated debate about the technicalities I think is positive not negative.

Paul:
It strikes me that there is a little bit of confusion among the business community about what is actually expected of them. Things like the Disability Discrimination Act. They’re not sure how it should be interpreted in reality. Do you think there’s a case or there’s a need for more legal cases to be taken up so that the boundaries of accessibility are better defined?

Julie:
I think there’s a few things in there. I think that the greatest problem that we have, rather than it being arguments about the technicality, is actually a PR issue. We have guidance. We have the Web Content Accessibility Guidance and the other two separate guidance published by the Web Accessibility Initiative. We also have the document published by the British Standards Institution, PAS-78, and I guess we’ll talk about that a little bit more. What we lack is any consistent and well resourced drive to raise awareness of those documents among the community that needs to now about them and that is businesses. That for me is the missing part of the puzzle. Of course the guidelines will keep changing because the technology is changing at such a fast rate. So that I think is healthy. But what we really do need is more effort put into helping businesses understand the guidance that we have. Businesses should not be engaged in the technical discussions because that’s not where they fit into all of this. Businesses want clear, succinct, and that’s a huge problem I have with WCAG2, succinct guidance so that they just know what to… Businesses are saying to us, and I’m saying “us” as in the voluntary sector, the government, the Disability Rights Commission (DRC), that they care about the disabled peoples access and they want to do something about it. They just don’t know what to do. They are confused about which guidance to follow and to my mind, that is due to poor PR and not having any single government department or agency in the UK responsible for pushing the guidance. We’ve got individual organisations and voluntary organisations such as RNIB and RNID doing great work on their own but there’s no government force or business force behind it. Championing the guidance that we have and saying “Actually, there’s no confusion here. The guidance has been published, it is stable and this is all you have to do to follow it. Go forth and get on with it”.

Paul:
Let’s talk about PAS-78 a little bit in context of the business community and what they need to know. Correct me if I am wrong but my understanding of that document is that it was meant to be advice for people that run websites, website owners, to really get them up and running. Is that a fair assessment of what it was about?

Julie:
Erm… I’ve never heard it described that way.

Paul:
[Laughs]

Julie:
[Laughing] I would say that it’s there to provide clarity. We were concerned by the feedback that we were receiving that people in the business community were confused about the range of accessibility guidance that was available on the web. If you go to a search engine and type in “web accessibility”, you get all sorts of stuff back and some of it seems to be conflicting. So what we wanted to do with PAS-78 was pull all of the web accessibility guidance that’s produced by WAI, and also that’s produced by the software developers such as Adobe and others like Microsoft, all together into a single document that can be read within a couple of hours if you want to sit down and read it end to end or could easily be dipped in and out of, which was the definitive guide to the process of making a website accessible. The existing technical guidelines are not for business managers so we have written a document that is in a language that business managers can engage with, can digest, and puts everything together as a process. So it talks about guidelines and it doesn’t seek to create any new guidance. It points to guidance that’s already been published by WAI and others. But it also explains this is a process. This is what you do at this stage and it’s very important to involve disabled people at this stage; at this stage you should write an accessibility policy, later an accessibility statement. These are some of the questions you might want to ask when you are appointing a web design agency. So it puts all of that together in one document. That’s what we were seeking to do really. There’s a few words I used when I was launching it. Two of those words were harmonise and consolidate. It was nothing new. It was bringing together all of the guidance so there was absolutely no doubt. If anyone in the business says “I don’t understand what to do to make my site accessible”, PAS-78 is the only answer they need.

Paul:
OK. So where would they find and get hold of that?

Julie:
Well PAS-78 is free. Now it’s freely available because of the Disability Rights Commission. If you go to the DRC, the DRC have a licensing agreement with the British Standards Institution. So if you go to the Disability Rights Commission website you can download a PAS-78. It’s available in a variety of formats including accessible PDF. After all the medium is the message. The website address for that is http://www.drc-gb.org/pas.

Paul:
Well that brings us nicely onto WCAG then doesn’t it. What are your impressions are of WCAG2, how the WCAG Samurai stuff fits into that and what your current thinking is on all of this?

Julie:
Yeah, we live in interesting times as they say. I’ve been involved with WAI to a lesser and greater degree since 1995. A long time. I’m very conversant in the processes that are there. Now I’m a policy person and a disability rights campaigner. I’m not a coder. I’m not a geek, meant in the nicest possible way, and I’ve got no interest in become one either. I used to design websites but that was back in the day and it’s all very different now. What I care about is disabled people getting access to the web. I care that businesses are enable to make that happen. So as your listeners know WCAG2 has been in development for a really long time. That in itself troubles me because that makes it seem like disabled people are a huge nuisance and very, very difficult to cater for because an organisation catering in specialising to disabled peoples needs on the web takes many, many years to come up with guidance. I don’t like the message that puts out and I think that fuels some of that kind of confusion and misunderstanding and hence that’s why we did the PAS. It was so much quicker and it puts out, I feel, the right messages. People joke about it now don’t they. How long it’s taken WCAG2 to appear and that is because it’s subject to a very rigorous process of course but taking a long time. Now it’s in its latest drafting stages and I have to say… I’m sure you’ve read it or at least looked at it. I haven’t read it because I don’t have the time to read a document of that size. However, it’s not for me. It really is a technical manual now and as a technical manual, what is important is that those of you who are developing code and need to read the technical stuff are engaged by it, will read it and use it effectively. So that’s where the checking needs to be done. I think in the past where we’re getting some of these struggles at the moment, is because WCAG1 was a document for all. So you could read it if you were a developer and you could also have a good read of it if you weren’t and get something out of it. Looking at it now, it looks like a technical manual. Then, for me, it comes back down to PR. If it’s a technical manual then they to call it such and make it clear. If you put that on the desk of any business director general / CEO and well you can imagine the reception that you’ll get, who wants to read that? That said WAI always produce very comprehensive guides to their guidelines and curricular to help the various groups to apply the guidance correctly. They will do so in this case and again for me it’s down to PR. It needs to be made very clear to each individual group, developers, business owners, advocates as well, which guidance is for which group so that we don’t get people belly aching “Oh this is too long”, “I don’t have time to read a document of 100+ pages”.

Paul:
What hadn’t occurred to me there until you just said it, the fact that this applies not just to people like Adobe and Microsoft but also applies to me potentially. If I’m developing a web application that enables users to contribute and upload content then in effect I’m being an equivalent of a Facebook or a Myspace and I need to be aware of those kinds of accessibility issues there are well. It’s quite interesting.

Julie:
It is and then it gets more interesting when you look at it in the context of the law in this country. We have the Disability Discrimination Act and that puts, and I choose these words very carefully, a legal duty on “service providers”. Now software developers are not covered by the DDA. However, the line is blurring. If a website is inaccessible, say a blind person goes to a site to do some shopping and it’s inaccessible, who’s responsibility is it? Whose legal duty is it that the site is accessible? Well it’s the owner of the business because it’s their service. But there’s an argument that the developer who coded the site has aided and abetted the discrimination. But we don’t have any case laws so this is all theoretical until we do get some case laws to back up what were saying. However software developers are not subject to the DDA. There’s a blurry of the lines, in my opinion, between a service provider and a software developer. But if I was to take an educated guess, if a disabled person experienced an instance of discrimination as defined under the Disability Discrimination Act and that happened because they tried to utilise a server via somebody’s page on a social networking site, who would be responsible? That would be very interesting. We also have the DDA, the Disability Discrimination Act. I have Multiple sclerosis. Everybody knows this. I’m very open about it and it really informs my work. Being somebody who stands to benefit, stands to live my life as I choose to and prosper because of the DDA, I can tell you from this side of the fence that the DDA is a very weak piece of legislation as it is. We don’t to date have any case law regarding websites but even if there was a case, it would take quite a number of cases to have any useful body of guidance other than what we already have and know as is published in PAS-78. Really that is your best guide. So yeah, interesting times that we live in. What I would say is that would hope that anybody who is responsible for social networking has a social conscience and cares very much about the ability of every member of society to be able to use the content, to both access it and create it. Unfortunately, disabled people don’t always figure in the planning process when people are putting together solutions and this is again where the web accessibility needs to keep on ramping up that awareness effort to get everybody to understand and to be thinking about disabled people at the earliest part of the conceptual process for new technology. It’s an issue we’ve always had that with web accessibility we’re always running to catch up because new ideas that come to market on the web really, really quickly and the trick to it, in my opinion, is getting close to the innovators, throwing in their face and keep on reminding them. Today we’re talking about accessibility of social networks, tomorrow it will be something else but I’ve got no idea what it’ll be.

Paul:
OK. So just before we wrap up let’s bring it back down to the more mundane day to day level. There will be a lot of people that are listening to this podcast and listening to our conversation thinking “Wow! This seems really overwhelming. It all seems very complicated. There seems to be talking about us having to get disabled people in to do testing, that sounds very expensive. There are legal obligations here and that sounds very scary. There are these various technical guidelines and they all seem very confusing.” Just to those people that are web sites owners that have perhaps buried their head in the sand so far about accessibility. What little step would you suggest to them? Just to get them going. Just to make the first tentative steps into the world of making their site more accessible.

Julie:
The first document to read is PAS-78 which is free of charge. It’s only about 60 pages and that’s in large print. It really is quite an easy read. We made sure of that when we wrote it. PAS-78 sets it all out in plain language. It’s very much written with the business audience in mind. I’d also offer some encouragement. Have a look at some of the case studies, you can easily find them on the web, of big companies that have applied accessibility and are profiting from it. An example being Legal & General, the one that I talk about a lot at the moment. Legal & General had a 300% increase in the take-up of one of their financial products via their website after they made the site more accessible.

Paul:
Wow!

Julie:
300% in a matter of months. You wouldn’t dare set that as a business target. It astonished me and I’ve long believed in this stuff. 300% is amazing. There’s also been a lot written about Tesco. Tesco take millions more in extra business away from their competitors because they’ve made their site more accessible. Accessibility is a good news story. There is money to be had through accessibility. If you make your website content available to the biggest possible audience that you’re tapping into a much bigger pot of money. Disabled people as a group in the UK alone are estimated to have an annual spending power in the region of £85 billion! An incredible amount of money that someone needs to exploit, to capitalise one. Disable people are very happy to be marketed to. Perhaps more so than other groups because disabled people, in particular blind people, are not exposed to advertising and therefore not exposed to a lot of choice that those of us that can see take for granted. Accessible sites are also interoperable sites. They work well on different platforms. If you make your site accessible for a PC you’re making it accessible for many other technologies including a mobile phone which people are using increasingly more now in the UK. Yes, there is a legal imperative as well. I wouldn’t be afraid of that though. There’s a long process involved in that. The DDA to safeguard disabled people’s rights to participate in society. Now indeed when a disabled people feels and finds that they have been discriminated against because of the way a web service is presented to them, of course they are going to feel angry and upset. I have long said I have never understood why I should be able to use a product or service to buy some tickets online because I can see but my blind friend can’t. To me that’s completely unacceptable and unnecessary discrimination. However it’s not a case of “Oh I’m not happy” and we’re all in court. There’s a process there of conciliation. The DRC is involved in that process or it can be, as well as a number of disability organisations because what we want is not to take anybody to the cleaners. It’s to make the web more accessible. The key to that is my mind is dialog. When I used to work at RNIB, if a blind person contacted me having found a website they couldn’t use and it was one of the bigger ones. This is what happened with Tesco. 40 blind people got onto us saying they couldn’t use Tesco and they wanted a legal case to be taken. This was tremendous because it’s alerted Tesco to this issue and it meant that we were able to start a dialogue, the result of which is hundreds if not thousands of blind people are now able to do online shopping for their groceries and delivered to their home which is wonderful. Tesco is not unhappy because it’s bringing in a lot more money through that channel where it wasn’t bringing in any previously from disabled people because it was inaccessible. What we are trying to achieve here is sustained change that will see disabled people included in society to the degree that it would seem outrageous and ridiculous not to do so. Big changes happen. I never thought I’d see smoking banned in public places. I can’t believe it. My goodness if we can do that as a society we can change the way we behave towards disabled people, stop belly aching about the issues and talk to each other about working towards solutions. I’m optimistic that in 20 years we’ll see disabled people much more included in everything that we are all doing now to keep the debate about disabled people and accessibility alive, contributing to a brighter future for disabled people. We should just keep on doing what we are all doing.

Paul:
Excellent. Thank you so much Julie for taking time to come in and talk about that. It was really interesting. I hope to get you back in again in the future before too long.

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Show 90: Digg

Posted in Classic shows on 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.

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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…

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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.

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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.

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Show 89: 404

Posted in Classic shows on 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.

Download this show.

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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.

Recording creativity

Posted in Design on by Paul Boag

I have found that by recording all of the ideas and reviewing them regularly it has actually stimulated me to be more creative.

I like to think of myself as an ideas person. I guess that is another way of saying that I am crap at implementing the ideas I have. One problem I used to suffer from was recording the ideas I had in a form that I could refer back to later. Overtime I have developed a couple of techniques that help me manage my ideas better. I thought they might be worth sharing.

Its two in the morning and I am lying in bed thinking about something when an idea for a new blog post pops into my head. I am on a family picnic when I see a colourful moss covered rock, which would work brilliantly as a website palette. I am browsing a new website and find myself really impressed by the approach they take to dropdown menus.

The thing is that inspiration can strike anywhere and you need a system to record all of that stuff and a method of referring back to it later in order to make sure those ideas are implemented. The system I use to do all of this is vaguely built around the Getting Things Done approach proposed by David Allen. It consists of three stages:

  • Capturing
  • Processing
  • Reviewing

Lets look at each of these in turn…

Capturing

Because inspiration can strike anywhere you need to be ready for it. In the car, in bed, down the pub, wherever it is you need to be able to record it immediately. If you don’t it will be lost forever. I have also learnt not to discriminate at this stage. I just capture everything. I can worry about if it is a good idea or a useful piece of information later. If it captures my interest for whatever reason it gets recorded.

Personally, I use two main tools for recording ideas. A notepad and my mobile phone. I make sure I have a note book and a pen by my bed at night. I tend to have some of my best ideas when I am relaxed and waiting to fall asleep. However, I have learnt that if I don’t write those ideas down when I have them, my mind obsesses over them and so I don’t sleep. By writing them down straight away they are off my mind and I can deal with them in the morning. One handy tip is that if like me you are married (or have a partner) you might want to have a torch around too. It stops you being shouted at for continually turning on the light!

Although a notepad is great it is not good for certain things and that is where the mobile comes in. Firstly, most mobile phones these days have a camera and I find that invaluable. The camera in my phone is crap but it does the job. It allows me to recall architecture that inspired me, or colour palettes that I could reuse. I also photograph signs or information I want to refer back to later. Basically it is a quick and easy way of grabbing information.

However, my phone also has another useful little function. It can record audio notes. The second most common place for me to have inspiration (after my bed) is driving in the car. Scribbling down notes isn’t very viable in that situation so being able to record a quick audio note is very useful. If your phone does not support this then do what Marcus does; call you home phone and leave yourself a message. This achieves exactly the same thing.

Finally if you are inspired by something you see on a website then make sure you have a quick and easy way to capture it. There are some great screen capture programs about so make sure you have one installed.

Processing

Of course capturing this information is no good if nothing is ever done with it. You need a way of processing the ideas you have had. Those ideas generally fall into two categories. Stuff that you have a specific use for and things that might come in handy one day. So for example, the idea to write this blog post was a specific idea. Specific ideas should normally be stored alongside related information. In the case of this blog post I have a list of all the various blog post ideas I have ever come up with. However, some of the stuff you capture is more random and you might not have a specific use for it. It could be a colour scheme you like, a quote that grabbed your attention or a vague idea for a project you might want to do one day (maybe).

All of these general ideas need storing together somehow. If they remain in your notepad, mobile or indeed anywhere else, it will make reviewing them very difficult. How you choose to store them is entirely up to you. For example, I have seen people use a large scrapbook. Personally, I prefer to store things electronically as this allows me to search and tag the information. I tend to use a program called YoJimbo for the Mac however if you are Microsoft based you might want to take a look at One Note. This is an excellent program for storing random “stuff” and has some cool features like character recognition of images built in. I store all kinds of stuff in YoJimbo including links, colours, images, quotes or indeed pretty much anything else that inspires me.

Before I move on, one quick note on the quality of the stuff I store. One of the big problems I had for a long time is that I was too critical of my ideas. I would throw things out when I considered them “stupid” or “impractical”. I have stopped doing that now. Instead, when I process my ideas into YoJimbo I mark an idea as either hot or not. You will see why this is important when I talk about reviewing.

Reviewing

The final step in my little process is reviewing. I have found that if I just dump all of my ideas into YoJimbo it quickly becomes this black hole that I rarely really look at. So taking a leaf out of the GTD methodology I have started to regularly review the content of my “idea store”. I don’t do it as often as the weekly review proposed in GTD, but I do it every couple of weeks.

In these review I tend to focus on the “hot” ideas and actively look for ways I can implement them. Then, once a month or so (when I have a bit more time), I also review the “not so hot” ideas as well just to keep them fresh in my mind. These often spark new “hotter” ideas which I record in the system too.

Conclusion

Admittedly this might all seem a little over the top, but it works for me. I have found that by recording all of the ideas and reviewing them regularly it has actually stimulated me to be more creative. I think this is partly because one idea, or piece of inspiration, sparks another. However, I also think it is because an idea carries value if it is recorded and that makes me feel that dreaming up ideas is worth while.

Show 83: iphone bollocks

Posted in Classic shows on by Paul Boag

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

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News and events

Safari for Windows

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

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

We will see.

Applications for the iphone

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

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

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

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

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

Web Design-isms: 7 Surefire Styles that Work

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

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

CSS frameworks

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

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

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

Agony uncle: The importance of undo

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

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

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

Client corner: Stakeholder interviews

Got this question from Dusted.

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

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

Starting off with a few…

  • Describe your department’s needs of the web site.
  • What can be done in a better way?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Politics

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

Education

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

Verification

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

Semi-structured

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

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

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

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

Ask the expert: Struan Robertson on Legal Issues

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

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

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

Show 82: Microsoft drones

Posted in Classic shows on by Paul Boag

This week on Boagworld: Paul talks about managing enquiries, Marcus asks whether you should add links to your website on client sites and Rob Borley talks about ASP .net.

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News and events

Staying Creative

I came across a great article this week by Keith Robinson about how to keep being consistently creative. Constantly being creative can be a challenge sometimes, especially when a chunk of your time is spent on less creative activities like coding or consultancy. This article provides some incredibly practical advice about how to keep those creative juices flowing.

The one part that particularly resonated with me was the need for time to play. I am very fortunate at Headscape that Chris and Marcus let me have time to experiment and try new stuff. The result is that I am much more creative than when I used to do production work all the time.

However, this article also offers advice for those of you who don’t have the same luxury. It talks about how to force yourself to engage on even the most dull project as well as the need to pursue your own projects and interact with other creative people.

WCAG Samurai

Over a year ago now Joe Clark published an article on A List Apart entitled “to hell with WCAG 2.0“. Following this slamming attack he went on to create the WCAG Samurai who would develop an alternative to WCAG 2 based on WCAG 1. A year later and we have a working draft of WCAG 2 as well as the recently released WCAG Samurai guidelines.

I have to say the WCAG Samurai Errata is a lot easier to understand than WCAG 2.0 but WCAG 2.0 has come a long way since Joe Clark’s article. Personally, the arrival of the WCAG Samurai guidelines have generated mixed feels in me.

I not an accessibility expert and so am naturally drawn to the Samurai guidelines. They are easy to understand and don’t use confusing or vague language. However, at the same time I have a feeling that yet another set of guidelines is only going to confuse matters.

I guess my hope is that all of the different interpretations on accessibility will make clients realize that accessibility is about more than confirming to a series of checkpoints and encourage them to start thinking in depth about their accessibility policy.

Movable Type 4 (Beta)

Yes I use Movable Type. I know the rest of the world uses WordPress but movable type works for me. I run the boagworld website on movable type and have no intention of changing so don’t bother writing in trying to convince me.

That said, I wanted to point out the recent release of a beta for Movable Type 4. I have to say I haven’t installed it yet but it looks good. Its still in beta and apparently buggy in places but some of the features look impressive.

They have revamped the interface which in my opinion was better than WordPress anyway. They have improved the content management capabilities, finally added a WYSIWYG editor and added support for Open ID.

If you are not already a Word Press drone then check it out.

Mobile web developers guide

This week the dev.mobi website has released a comprehensive guide for mobile web developers.

If you have listened to this podcast for any length of time you will know that I am constantly banging on about the mobile web. Developing websites that work on mobile devices is going to become ever bigger business and although it is a challenging area, I think it will be a huge niche for those willing to embrace it.

Of course, at the moment it is a relatively immature market and finding good information can be tricky. However, this guide looks very good. I can’t claim to have read it all yet but from what I have seen this is a must read if you are looking to explore the area of the mobile web further.

Agony uncle: Promotional links

I was ferreting around in the forum for something to chat about and found this question from Remy:

I was wondering what the opinion was on adding a “Site built by Such and Co.” at the footer of a client web site.





I remember thinking it was normal practice in the late 90s and early 00s, but the more I look around today the less and less I see other web design/developer firms doing it.





I do think it’s a cleaner design if you don’t add a link off to a random (to the user) web site, but I remember hearing on one of the podcasts on boagworld that this is how this had contributed to Headscape’s (page)ranking on Google – i.e. by having well ranked web sites linking back to Headscape.





Just want to see what other people thought before I go and slap a nasty ‘who dunit’ at the bottom of my client’s web site.




This is a fairly old post and there’s a lot of interesting and useful stuff on there. But I thought that chatting things through, and letting people know what Headscape does, could be useful.

It generates business

It really does. Lots of it. I can honestly say that I think our credit (which was, interestingly, on a separate credits page) on the old National Trust site played a major part in whether or not Headscape would have survived its first couple of years.

I try to make sure that I always ask new enquirers how they discovered Headscape. Off the top of my head, I would say that around 1 in 20 say they followed a link from one of the sites we have built. We are currently talking to a prospect that followed the link on one of the university sites we developed.

Don’t expect a link

Whether a link appears is up to the client. Ask them if they mind. If they do, ask if you could have a link on a credits page or possibly just on a single page (e.g. ‘About this site’ if they have one or the contact page).

If they still mind, leave it.

We formalise the arrangement in our terms and conditions, as follows:

The Contractor shall have the right to incorporate, in a readily viewable location, a credit and hypertext link in the Deliverables.

Use useful wording

Useful wording to a search engine that is. For example, ‘Designed by Headscape’ doesn’t really help page ranking at all, whereas ‘Web design by Headscape’ does as it includes the search term ‘web design’.

Beware CMS based sites!

There is always the possibility that doing this could backfire. If a client has control over aspects of a site’s presentation then there is always the possibility that they could make a nasty mess of your excellent work. You have to ask yourself whether a link, in this case, is valuable.

Client corner: Handling enquiries

The idea of the client corner section is that we tackle questions clients have. However, this week I answer a problem I am facing myself; how to handle enquiries better. We get enquiries from the Headscape website and I just don’t think we handle them very well. I always have the feeling some are getting lost and when I go away on holiday they just don’t get answered. After some thought on the subject I think I have come up with some enquiry handling techniques that might help.

Ask the expert: Rob Borley on ASP .net

I often get people asking to know more about the way we work as Headscape. What technologies do we use, what approaches do we take, how do we make business decisions? To be honest I often avoid this questions because I don’t want this podcast to feel too much like a Headscape sales pitch. However, several times I have been asked by people why Headscape works mainly with ASP .net instead of PHP or Ruby on Rails so I thought we might take a look at that decision.

Knowing little about server side coding myself I thought it was best to get Rob Borley (our technical lead) onto the show to talk about the decision we made in going down the .net route.

Its actually a really interesting segment that gives a real insight into how we run our business and how we go about making decisions in regards to technology.

Advice for CMS users

Posted in Accessibility, Site content on by Paul Boag

I have been putting together a document for work that provides some basic advice for people who work with content management systems. It covers things like accessibility and writing for the web.

Introduction

Although content management systems enable anybody to publish content to the web, they do not guarantee the quality of what is published. Many content managed websites are hard to use, inaccessible and poorly structured not because of any failure in the design or technology but simply because the quality of content is poor.

This document aims to introduce the reader to good practice for generating web content. In particular it focuses on advice about writing for the web and ensuring that what is produced is accessible to the widest audience possible.

Writing for the web

Writing great web content is a particular skill. Although it shares some characteristics with writing for other medium, there are many unique elements too.

Two traits make writing for the web, particularly challenging. Firstly is the perception that most people have that computers are being cold and impersonal. Many see technology as the enemy and so a good copywriter has to work hard to ensure their copy has a friendly and approachable tone.

Second is the fact that users rarely read pages in their entirety, but rather scan read. The emphasis is on looking for the next link that will take them one step closer to their goal.

Below we investigate these two challenges in more depth and suggest some possible solutions.

Writing style

Well-written copy should be both engaging and accessible. In other words it should overcome people’s inherent suspicion of technology and ensure that, as wide an audience as possible understand what is written.

Engaging with the user

Computers are immensely unfriendly. This is mainly due to their total inability to interpret or communicate the more subtle forms of human communication such as body language and tone of voice.

The result is that most people find interacting with a computer a cold and frustrating experience. However, there are techniques you can use to avoid the problem. These include:

Using a personal tone

By ensuring that your copy is friendly, informal and approachable, you help to counteract the inherent lack of personality associated with computers and the web. Even on a relatively formal site add more informality than you normally would in order to offset the users default perception.

Writing how you speak

If you are experienced in writing more formal offline documentation, writing in a more informal manner can be difficult. Although there is no one catchall solution to this, writing as you speak will certainly aid comprehension and generate a more informal feel.

Avoid being patronizing

The danger of writing in a more informal tone is that you overcompensate and your writing style becomes ‘chummy’ and patronizing. The writing as you speak rule comes in useful here. Picture your audience and ask yourself whether you would speak to them like that in a face-to-face meeting.

Making your copy clear

The W3C accessibility guidelines clearly state:

Use the clearest and simplest language appropriate for a site’s content.

In other words ensure that your reader can understand what you have written.

Many people make huge assumptions about what their audience understands and careful consideration needs to be put into this subject. Particular assumptions are made in regards to:

Jargon

A common pitfall is the use of abbreviations and acronyms within web copy. The assumption is that your target audience will already be aware of the jargon used. However, this is an entirely false assumption.

You cannot always assume that your audience will be aware of every acronym around. For example there are so many acronyms within web design that it would be impossible for one individual to know them all.

Secondly, the reader maybe relative new to your target audience and so still learning much of the ‘lingo’.

When writing copy ensure that whenever possible jargon is avoided and where that is not possible that it is accompanied by an explanation. We discuss acronyms and abbreviations further in the accessibility section.

Reading level

There are reasons why tabloid newspapers like the Sun sell so well. One of those reasons is because they require such a low reading level. As many as 40% of the population have a low literacy level and yet little consideration is given to their accessibility needs.

Even when writing for a well-educated audience you cannot make assumptions about their reading level. Many people suffer from attention deficit disorder, dyslexia or other conditions that could affect their ability to process what you have written.

Below is some advice on how you might go about improving comprehension of your copy:

  • Simplify punctuation – People suffering from a low literacy levels struggle with long sentences that include a lot of complex punctuation. Keep your sentences short and your punctuation simple.
  • Be consistent – There is often a desire when writing copy to vary your language to prevent a document appearing repetitive. Although this has its place it does make copy harder to comprehend. Where possible, use terms in a consistent manner across the whole site.
  • Use numbers not words – By simply referring to 1223 instead of ‘one thousand two hundred and twenty three’ you increase comprehension dramatically as well as shorten sentences and aid scanability.
  • Specify clear actions – If you wish a user to complete an action (for example to click on a button) clearly specify this. Do not assume the user will instinctively understand what is required of them.
  • Use imagery – The saying ‘an image speaks a thousand words’ is very true for low literacy users. If an image will help to convey the meaning of a page be sure to use it to support existing copy.

Although the techniques above are of particular benefit to low literacy users, they do actually offer benefits to all users. Ease to comprehend copy aids the speed at which information can be digested and helps users scan copy as we are going to look at next.

Making web pages easy to scan

It can be a depressing realization that users will probably not read your carefully crafted text. However, the sooner you accept this reality the sooner you can start to adapt copy to aid users in their hunt for information.

There are a number of techniques that can be used to help a user quickly scan through a page and identify the information they require:

Front loading

Front loading applies in two different contexts. Firstly, front-load the page by including a summary of the entire page right at the beginning of the document. This helps the user ascertain quickly whether the page is relevant to them or not. Secondly, front-load each individual paragraph so that the main point is first. Ideally a paragraph should only make a single point (see 2.2.2) but if it is longer then the user can get the gist by reading the first sentence.

Keep it short

Usability expert, Steve Krug recommends in his book “Don’t Make Me Think!: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability” that a copywriter should take his copy, edit it down to half its original length and then half it again. This sounds like an impossible task but it is often easier than it appears. By removing repetition, marketing speak, and ‘happy talk’ (content with no real substance like ‘welcome to this site’) you will quickly find your content substantially reduced.

Keep paragraphs short

As well as keeping the page as a whole sort, you should ensure individual paragraphs are short too. Each paragraph should make a single point as this aids both user scanning and comprehension.

 

Keep sentences short

 

At a micro level you should also endeavor to keep each individual sentence as short as possible. Again this aids scanability and comprehension but also helps to remove any unnecessary ‘waffle’.

Break your copy up

As well as breaking up copy into short sentences and paragraphs you can also aid scanability by using other techniques as well. Look at each paragraph and ask yourself the following:

  • Can I associate a heading or sub heading with this block of text?
  • Could this paragraph be reduced to an easy to scan bullet point list?
  • Is there a key message in this paragraph that users need to instantly see?

If the answer to the last question is yes, then you might wish to use a breakout box (also known as a pull out). This is a technique originally introduced in magazines to ‘hook the user’. They would take a key line from an article and highlight it in someway (usually in a separate box) to draw the reader into reading the rest of the article. The same technique can be used on a web page to draw a users attention to a key point that they maybe searching for.

Many good content management systems (including Headscape’s own CMS) provide this functionality.

Accessibility

We have already touched on the importance of accessibility when talking about writing clear copy, however accessibility extends beyond simply the copy you write.

As a content management system user, you are required to go beyond just writing the copy. You are also required to enter the copy into the system so that it can be displayed on the site. This requires you to ‘markup’ your copy correctly.

The importance of markup

So what exactly is markup? Markup is the method by which you tell the browser what the content you are entering is, so that the browser knows how to display it to the user. This markup is usually written as HTML.

So, if for example you want to tell the browser that something is a heading you would mark it up like this:

<h1>This is a heading</h1>

or a paragraph would be marked up like this:

<p>This is a paragraph of text</p>

Of course, one of the main attractions of most content management systems is that you don’t have to know how to write HTML. Instead the content management system will add the code for you.

Historically content management systems didn’t even try to understand what any individual piece of content was. Instead they let you as the content management user, style the content to look however you wanted. So instead of telling the system that this is a heading you simply made it look big and bold so users of the site would know.

Although this sounds like a good approach in principle, it actually opens up a whole load of problems that are too extensive to cover here.

More modern content management systems, such as the ones deployed by Headscape, ask the user to explain what each piece of content is so that the system can add the proper HTML code.

The way the content management user does this is normally through a drop down menu of styles much like you find in Microsoft word. You simply select a block of text and choose the style which best describes that text.

Marking up content in this way brings a whole host of advantages including (but not limited to):

  • The ability to redesign how an individual style looks universally across the entire site without editing each page.
  • The ability to change the appearance of styles based on what device is accessing the content (for example a mobile device style).
  • The ability for screen readers and other assistive technologies to understand the site.

In short, a well marked up piece of content will be available to a much larger audience and is easier to change and adapt.

Text alternatives

Well marked up content is not the only way to improve the accessibility of your site. Another is to provide text alternatives for elements that some users will not be able to access.

The most common example of this is with the inclusion of images into your pages.

There are a number of reasons why a user may not be able to see the images on a page. These could range from viewing the page via a mobile device to the user suffering from some form of visual impairment. However, whatever the reason the solution is the same; add alternative text that describes the image.

Alternative text is only visible to users who cannot see the image and so does not impact the design in anyway. The method of adding alternative text will vary between content management systems but in most cases (including on the Headscape system) you will be asked to add some text when you try and insert an image. A good system will go as far as requiring alternative text before approving an image for insertion.

A common mistake that is made with alternative text is to use it as a caption for the image rather than a description of the image. The difference is subtle but important. An image of Marcus Lillington our sales director might read ‘Marcus Lillington is more than happy to speak to you about your requirements’. This would be a caption rather than alternative text. Alternative text should describe the image and nothing more. So in the case of our example it should read simply; ‘Photograph of Marcus Lillington – sales director’.

Finally it is worth saying that the principle of alternative text does not apply just to images. It should apply to any screen element that can only be understood visually. That includes Flash, video, audio or other plugin.

Meaningful links

Another common accessibility mistake is with link text. When a content management user creates a link between pages it is not uncommon to see links with phrases like ‘click here’ or ‘read more’. This presents a problem for two reasons:

Firstly, users who access the web using screen readers often have all links on a page read back as a list in order to save listening to every piece of text when all they want to do is find the next link. A link like ‘click here’ means nothing when read out of context.

Secondly, many users will scan a page looking specifically at the links. They don’t read the text before or after the link so again they see it out of context. The result is that, like screen reader users, terms like ‘read more’ mean nothing.

This problem is easily avoided by ensuring that all links make sense out of context. So instead of linking the words ‘click here’ in the sentence ‘click here for more news’ you simply link to the phase ‘more news’ or ‘news archive’.

Acronyms and abbreviations

Earlier we talked about how where possible jargon, acronyms and abbreviations should be avoided. However there are occasions where that is not possible.

In such situations your choices are very much dictated by the functionality provided by the CMS you are using. Unfortunately, many content management systems are not particularly helpful in this regard and you maybe limited to typing out a description in brackets each time.

However, more modern content management systems such as that provided by Headscape, allow you to select an abbreviation style. You can then enter the full description and this becomes available to the user without destroying the flow of your text.

This is achieved in a variety of ways but the most common is using a dotted underline. If a piece of text has been marked up as an acronym or abbreviation it will appear to the end user as text with a dotted underline. When the user moves her cursor over the text the cursor changes to a help symbol and displays the full description as a tooltip.

This provides a full description to users encountering a piece of jargon for the first time, without getting in the way of those who already know what it means.

Using tables correctly

Web design has changed a lot over the last few years and so have content management systems. One of the most significant changes has been a move away from table-based layout.

Table-based layout is a technique that uses tables to position content on a page. However this is an abuse of the table feature in HTML and can cause significant accessibility problems especially for users running on older PCs or using mobile devices.

We therefore strongly recommend that using tables for layout is avoided at all costs. Instead clearly markup the content using the descriptive styles provided. The system will do the formatting and positioning.

That said there is still a place for tables. Tables were originally intended for tabular data (data made up of columns and rows, like that found in a spreadsheet). If you have information like this you wish to include on a page, then this is when you should use a table.

Working with imagery

Although we have already spoken about imagery in the context of alternative text it is worth noting that there are other accessibility issues relating to imagery you should be aware of:

Animation

Animation can be a problem area if not handled correctly, so generally speaking it is better to avoid the use of animated imagery unless it helps explain the content in someway.

The main reason that animation can be problematic is because certain forms of cognitive disability can be made worse by flashing animation. It can prove distracting and make it harder to process the content being read.

If animation is to be used we recommend:

  • That the user is given the ability to disable the animation
  • That the animation is not too rapid so that it proves less distracting
Colour

Finally, it is worth noting that a considerable proportion of your users will suffer from some form of colour blindness. For example almost 1 in 10 men are colour blind. In addition it is possible that other users will be accessing your site through black and white monitors on mobile devices. It is therefore important to ensure that any imagery you use is not reliant on colour to communicate information and that there is sufficient contrast between foreground and background colours.

These two issues are addressed in the W3C guidelines on accessibility:

2.1 Ensure that all information conveyed with color is also available without color, for example from context or markup.

2.2 Ensure that foreground and background color combinations provide sufficient contrast when viewed by someone having color deficits or when viewed on a black and white screen.

Further information

Hopefully this document has been useful in outlining some of the basics of writing content for a website. However, we have obviously only been able to scratch the surface.

If you would like further information, please do not hesitate to contact Paul Boag (the author of this document) using [email protected].

Keeping your home page clean

Posted in Design, User experience on by Paul Boag

In the fight for real estate, usability and design aesthetics are often the first causalities.

One of the most common sticking points I encounter when developing a website is the sign off of the home page. Client’s want to cram it with as much content as possible, while the designer is seeking to maintain the integrity of the design. So, what is the best way of avoiding this kind of confrontation?

I am sure you have come across requests like this before…

I need the logo bigger, more space for news, events and features, shortcuts to key applications, more prominent navigation and can you make the search stand out. Oh yes, and I don’t want the page to scroll at 800 by 600. Also, sales would like to add banner advertising across the top and down the side.

In many cases these absurd scenarios occur because of a perception that the home page is the most valuable location on a website. As a result all the various departments clammer to get their piece of the limelight.

In the fight for real estate, usability and design aesthetics are often the first causalities. Below I outline four techniques I am starting to use in order to bring some sanity back to the home page scramble.

Recognizing the changing role of the home page

One of the first steps to home page utopia is to get the stakeholders (those who are fighting for home page prominence) to recognise that the home page doesn’t have the importance that it once did. In fact I think it would be fair to say that we are going to see a continued decline in the traffic going to home pages over the coming years.

Jakob Nielsen in his book “Prioritizing Web Usability” talks about a change he is seeing in the way users are interacting with the web.

There was a time, says Nielsen, when users who had a specific task would go to a site where they thought that tasks could be completed. For example, if they wanted information on the Crisis in Darfur they would go directly to CNN or the BBC. However, more and more it would appear that instead of turning to a specific site and finding content via that sites home page, they are instead looking to search engines. The search engine takes the user directly to the information they require thereby completely bypassing the sites home page. Obviously, this deep linking seriously reduces the prominence of the home page.

Add to this the rise of RSS feeds and more people accessing information via mobile devices, and you begin to see the focus shifting from the website home page towards the individual pages of content. That is not to say home pages are no longer important, they are simply not as important as once they were and so do not justify the level of competition they receive in some organisations.

Don’t rush into the home page

Another technique I am starting to use more often is to avoid addressing the home page too early in the process. By starting with standard textual pages (which after all make up the majority of the site) you get to set the design style before it gets diluted by the land grab for home page real estate. Once the client has “bought in” to the design they will perceive it as being more important and so are less likely to allow it to be railroaded by content demands.

However, delaying the home page development isn’t just a “political” move. It is also the right thing to do. A home page should reflect the sites content at the highest level and signpost the user to key content deeper in the site. In the majority of projects I work on the client hasn’t finalized all of the content in the initial design stage. In my opinion it is hard to create an effective home page until you have a full understanding of what content it is meant to signpost and represent.

Communicating the importance of white space

In the case of home page design the heart of the conflict between designer and client is often a perception of the importance of white space. Every designer knows that white space is a fundamental tool of good design, but we are often bad at expressing why in a way the client can associate with.

This is an area I have been thinking about a lot recently and I have come up with a possible solution which I am yet to try. It was inspired by the book “The Laws of Simplicity (Simplicity: Design, Technology, Business, Life)” which I am currently in the process of reading. On the subject of white space the author says:

“The opportunity lost by increasing the amount of blank space is gained back with enhanced attention on what remains.”

Or in other words; the more you add the less importance anything has.

I think this is where we sometimes go wrong as designers. We sell white space on the basis that it looks better. Instead we should be selling it on the basis that every item you add to the page detracts from the rest.

To help the client think this through I am wondering whether a point system of some kind might help. You might want to suggest that a user has 10 points worth of attention they can give to the home page. Every “module of content” added to the home page takes a minimum of 1 point. More points should be assigned to more important elements. This approach will quickly show that the more you add to a page, the more likely important elements are going to get lost in the crowd.

I am not sure whether the approach would work in practice or not, but it does strike me as a good way to focus the clients mind on what is important.

Embrace rather than fearing the fold

The killer blow to any home page design is when the client says: oh yes, and we want all of that to fit above the fold. This inevitably leads to smaller typefaces and less white space.

I think we need to work hard as designers to dispel the myth that users never scroll. Sure, users don’t always scroll but that is okay as long as we put less important elements further down the page.

The idea that users don’t scroll is horribly out of date and probably comes from the very early writings of Jakob Nielsen. However as early as 1997 he was suggesting that users were becoming more comfortable with the idea.

If your client needs further proof then install Crazy Egg or some other heat map service on the clients site. This will actually show where on the page a user chooses to click. You will see a decline lower on the page but not enough to justify putting everything above the fold.

The emphasis should be prioritizing content rather than cramming everything into the small space above this ill defined line that we call the fold.

But how?

Of course the fundamental problem with educating our clients, is that in many cases you cannot talk to the people that are demanding home page space. This is a very real problem and in many cases there is little you can do to overcome it. However I was impressed by Shane Diffily’s idea of running stakeholder workshops in his recent A List Apart article. Having a workshop at the beginning of a project where you can talk about good practice and dispel some of these common myths is a superb idea and should help a lot of projects run that much smoother.

Show 79: Despise the listener

Posted in Classic shows on by Paul Boag

A great line up this week with Paul, Marcus and Andy Clarke.

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Podcast: Download (21.4MB)

We have a great lineup this week: Paul talks about getting things done in web design and an alternative approach to your reading list. Marcus explains the exciting area of insurance for web designers and we have Andy Clarke on the show to give us an update on CSS 3.

Download this show.

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News and events

Google Analytics gets interface upgrade

Like so many who join Google, Jeff Veen has been forced to be somewhat tight lipped about what he has been working on. However in the last week we have finally been able to see the fruits of his labors with the relaunch of a new and improved Google Analytics. You would be forgiven for thinking that a load of new functionality has been added to the service. In fact that is not the case. The only changes have been to the user interface. The difference is that you can now find everything quickly and easily.

If like me you found the old Analytics service confusing and difficult to use then you might want to take a look at the new revised version. It is a definite improvement.

Great new articles on A List Apart

For a while I have been a little disappointed with the articles coming out of A List Apart. Perhaps they were simply too “high brow” for the likes of me but they lacked any practical application. However this issue is different. It has two great articles about handling clients.

The first entitled “Stand and Deliver” provides some superb advice on presenting your designs to a client. The second called “Educate Your Stakeholders!” talks (unsurprisingly) about educating the decision makers in a web project so they make more informed choices.

Both are really superb articles and I would definitely recommend you check them out.

Teaching the traditional web

We are all acutely aware that the web is changing at a rapid rate. At the moment the focus is very much on web applications however we cannot afford to ignore the massive number of page based sites that still need to adapt to the changing way people are interacting online. In a post called Teaching the traditional web, Keith Robinson discusses how we need to alter our approach to page based websites based on deep linking, RSS feeds and mobile access. A very enlightening read.

Baselines and vertical rhythm

Having Richard Rutter on the show a few weeks back made me acutely aware of my shortcomings when it came to web typography. Although I promised myself I would look into the subject in more depth I was a bit vague as to where I should start. Fortunately Richard has given me a starting point with a list of resources on his site that look at the subject of baselines.

I know that many people find web typography an uninspiring subject but good typography can have such a profound impact on how people perceive design that it really is worth your attention.

Client corner: Getting things done in web design

I have just finished reading “Getting Things Done” by David Allen. Not only has it seriously helped me to get control of my workload but its also made me rethink how I approach web design projects with clients. In this week’s client corner I suggest some techniques that designers and clients should use when a new project is starting.

As seems to be the default approach these days I blogged on this earlier in the week so if you want more information on what I said in the show then be sure to check out that post.

Ask the expert: Andy Clarke on CSS 3

Following Andy Budd’s recent criticism of the W3C CSS Working group it seemed appropriate to have Andy Clarke on the show to talk about the progress of CSS 3. Andy is an invited expert on the CSS working group so has the inside track on what is really happening. In the show Andy talks about…

  • Some of the cool layout features available in CSS 3.
  • The modular nature of CSS3.
  • The slow progress made by the group.
  • And the need for the web design community to contribute in the process.

Agony uncle: Insurance for web designers

We received the following question from Brian last week:

As an avid listener to your podcast – and having spent the day catching up on them while travelling! – I was very interested in a particular segment where your good self and that Lillington chap mentioned your Terms and Conditions and having, ‘…all the right insurances in place…’, with regard to setting up a business.

I’ve recently done some work with a mate – a few hopefully not-too-shabby websites – and although we think we are getting the hang of sorting out contracts now, we have never been able to settle on what to put in our Terms and Conditions. Every time I start to do it I either glaze over or start putting stupid things in due basically to boredom!

As for insurance we never assumed that we would need any for web design. Its not like we’re making nitroglycerine or heart bypass machines… so we assumed the basic rules of common sense prevailed.

To this end, if you have any advice on what insurances might apply or what sort of thing should be covering in T&C’s?

Firstly I’ll cover the terms and conditions issue, much as I don’t want to appear protective over our ts & cs, we have reached the conclusion that by providing them we are in effect providing legal advice.

This is not what we do and it’s not a path we wish to tread!

We suggest speaking to your lawyer or maybe a local chamber of commerce who could provide a standard terms and conditions contract template. I also droned on about the different aspects of terms and conditions in episode 65.

Insurance, however, is another matter. Though, again, I am concerned about making stuff up here (as is often the case!) so the majority of the following content is from Business Link. This is what we currently pay good money for:

Professional Indemnity

If you are in the business of selling your knowledge or skills, you may want to consider taking out professional indemnity insurance.

This protects your business against compensation sought by a client if you have made mistakes or are found to have been negligent in some or all of the services that you provide for them. Professional indemnity insurance will also cover any legal costs.

Public Liability

If members of the public or customers come to your premises or you go to theirs, you should think about taking out public liability insurance. This type of insurance covers any awards of damages given to a member of the public because of an injury or damage to their property caused by you or your business.

Product Liability

In product liability insurance (PLI) terms, a product is any physical item that is sold or given away.

Products must be “fit for purpose”. Under the Consumer Protection Act 1987, you’re legally responsible for any damage or injury that a product you supply may cause. PLI covers you against compensation awarded as a result of damage to property or personal injury caused by your product.

Employers Liability

Employers’ liability compulsory insurance (ELCI) enables businesses to meet the costs of compensation and legal fees for employees who are injured or made ill at work through the fault of the employer.

Key Man Insurance

Key man insurance is designed to cover you for the financial costs of losing key personnel. We still have this for Paul….goodness knows why! ;-)

Review: Looking beyond web design books

This weeks review section isn’t so much a review as a recommendation. At SXSW you are really spoilt for choice as to what to attend. In fact there is so much choice it is overwhelming. After much consideration I decided to take an interesting approach. I decided to mainly attend panels on subjects I knew nothing, or little about. Instead of going to panels on CSS or design I went to sessions on marketing and strategy. The result was an incredibly enjoyable and enlightening week.

On my return to the UK I decided to take a similar approach in my reading. Prior to this the majority of books I read where either on CSS or Javascript. However I am now trying to broaden out the range of books I read to encompass other subjects like productivity, business process, and even some sociology. As with SXSW it has been an incredibly rewarding experience and something I would encourage others to do. I have been amazed at just how much of what I have read has related in someway to my job and I believe it has genuinely improved the quality of my work.

I would really encourage others to try the same thing and would like to suggest three books to break you in gradually. Although none of these books are directly to do with web design they all include valuable lessons that you can apply to your work on a daily basis…

Show 66: Beyond HTML

Posted in Classic shows on by Paul Boag

We have a bit of an audio and video theme to this week’s show with Ian Forrester talking about online video and Paul sharing some advice on creating a podcast. Marcus also continues his series on client contracts by looking at “the statement of work”.

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News and events

Mobile internet usage increasing

This week the BBC has reported that 15.9 million handsets in the UK accessed the web in December. This is an increase on over a million on the previous month. This further underlines the fact that the mobile web is going to be the big growth area in 2007.

Headscape recruiting

Headscape is expanding yet again. We are currently looking to recruit a .net developer and an experienced css/xhtml coder. If you are interested in either position send an email to [email protected].

Great British Booze Up

If you are attending SXSW this year then come along to the Great British Booze Up. ClearLeft, Boagworld and @Media 2007 are taking over a “British themed pub” (yeah right!) to bring you an evening of traditional British entertainment.

Enhance your page performance

There are two new articles on the Think Vitamin website this week. Unfortunately Chris Heilmann’s Article is far more interesting than my own. He looks at the issue of page performance, outlining some of the common problems and how to address them. He also has an interesting discussion on page performance verses best practice.

Some handy flash tips

Robert Nyman has obviously been struggling with Flash recently as he has posted two very useful tips on dealing with that pesky plugin ;) He shows you how to embed flash without invalidating your code as well as how to place an HTML element on top of a flash movie.

Client corner: The statement of work

This week Marcus takes a look at the statement of work, which is the cornerstone of the contract between client and developer. In particular he focuses on the various stages of the development cycle and what information needs to be covered in the contract. Elements covered include:

  • Kick off meetings – Who will attend, what documentation will be produced?
  • Information Architecture – Will there be expert reviews, stakeholder interviews or card sorting? What documentation will be provided, who will do the recruiting? What about wireframe testing?
  • Design concepts – How many concepts will be produced? How many different pages will be demonstrated? What happens if the client doesn’t like the design?
  •  Template development – What types of pages will need designing and building? What additional style sheets are going to be produced (print, mobile, low vision)? Will the client sign off each template?

Ask the Expert: Ian Forrester on video formats

Ian Forrester from BBC backstage and the Geek Dinners joins us to talk about online video. He talks through the different formats available (quicktime, real player, windows media and flash) as well as the different delivery mechanisms (steaming, download and progressive download).

Producing a podcast

Probably the most common question I get asked is how I go about producing Boagworld. That is why in this week’s show we combine the review and agony uncle sections to talk about the whole area of podcasting.

I share some thoughts on creating the right format as well as reviewing a range of podcasting tools including:

Show 65: Dying (Man Flu!)

Posted in Classic shows on by Paul Boag

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

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

Download this show.

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News and events

Barcamp

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

Paper prototyping

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

Bulletproof AJAX

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

Custom reading containers

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

Client corner: Terms and conditions

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

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

Agony Uncle: Browser support

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

Ask the expert: Ruby on Rails

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

Review: Vista

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

Show 63: More than iPhone

Posted in Classic shows on by Paul Boag

This week on Boagworld, Paul looks at whether it is possible to build HTML emails with CSS, Marcus discusses how to write a good brief and Christian Heilmannwades into the current Javascript library debate.

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News and events

Seems like there is loads going on in the world of web design this week and we struggled to narrow it down to four items. However, this is our pick of the best:

Getting a job as a developer

Christian Heilmann has written a post on his experiences of hiring developers at Yahoo! He gives some really sound advice to any developers in search of employment. Definitely worth a read if you are considering a change of job.

Talking of changing jobs, if you are a developer considering a career move then you might want to take a look at the developer position currently available within Headscape.

Global free stock imagery

Luke Sanderson (an old friend of mine) has taken the Google Coop and configured it to search all of the free image stock libraries from one place. Saves a bit of trawling around looking for that perfect (free) image.

The future of flash

Now, I don’t know much about flash but I know a man who does and he has just posted his impressions of the Flashforward keynote at MacWorld. He talks about Flash CS3, flash on alternative devices and reveals some fascinating stats on the take-up of Flash 9.

iPhone

Apples announcement of the iPhone seems to have caused a lot of excitement in all quarters not least the web design community. Brian Fling believes it could “revolutionaries the web”. Personally I find myself agreeing more with Cameron Moll who takes a more cautious view.

Agony Uncle: HTML emails built using CSS

This week has seen the discovery that Outlook 2007 uses Word to render its HTML emails rather than IE7. This severely limits what is possible when it comes to HTML emails and standards. It was therefore very topical that this week’s Agony Uncle Question is about using standards with HTML email. We look at what is possible and what is not referencing articles both on the A List Apart website and Campaign Monitor.

Ask the Expert: Javascript Libraries

The debate about the value of Javascript libraries has been raging for a while now but seems to be back with vengeance at the moment. That is why on this week’s show we have Christian Heilmann sharing his thoughts on the question, “Javascript libraries: Friend or Foe?”

Review: Pro CSS Techniques

Pro CSS Techniques is a new book by Ian Lloyd, Jeff Croft and Dan Rubin aimed at experienced CSS developers looking to take their skills on to the next level. Jonathan Snook provides an excellent review on this book that we reference in this week’s show.

Clients corner: Writing a web design brief

Writing an effective brief for web design agencies will not only make the selection process easier but helps to avoid potential miscommunications over requirements further down the line. In this week’s show Marcus looks at the issue of invitations to tender and how to go about writing an effective brief that will help your project run smoothly

Oh yes… don’t forget the boagworld meetup

Podcast 48: 10 ways to ruin your design

Posted in Classic shows on by Paul Boag

In the 48th episode of Boagworld.com we look at ten ways to produce a lousy design! We also look at some of the highs and lows of the mobile web as well as review an extremely good open source forum system.

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Ten ways to ruin your design

In this weeks show we take a light hearted look at some basic design concepts and the relationship between client and designer. This manifested itself as the top ten list below:

Overworking

One of the most classic design mistakes is not knowing when to stop. If you are looking to really mess up a design, be sure to continually pick at it far beyond what is reasonable. Although it is good to strive for perfection, a design can be ruined by constant reworking.

Failure to prioritise

Too many designs are full of different elements all screaming for the users attention. Failure to prioritise what is important on a page can lead to chaos, with all of the design elements on an equal footing. Designing like this leave the user totally confused as to where to begin.

Saying too much

The web equivalent of verbal diarerra can have a disastrous impact on design. Trying to communicate too much information can overwhelm users and leave a design looking busy and confusing.

Choose the colour palette from hell

Colour can make or break a design. A bad choice of colour is not only visually unappealing, it can also hamper accessibility, usability and drive users away. If picking a colour palette is not your strong suit then there are lots of tools around that can help.

Design by committee

One of the most common problems with choosing a design is that more than one person is involved in the decision making process. Because design is subjective you will get a different opinion from every person you show. The more people you show the more opinions you get. If it is necessary to keep all of these people happy you often end up with the lowest common denominator at the end of the day and then nobody likes it.

Fail to communicate

Conflict between designer and client is a sure fire way of destroying a good design. When a client expresses concerns about a design it is important they clearly explain their objections and that the designer doesn’t become defensive. A designer needs to be able to justifying their design approach but should always be willing to compromise.

Micro manage the design

Too many clients micro manage design work. They request specific design changes rather than focusing on overarching issues. If you find yourself micro managing a designer you should either change the designer, produce a new design from scratch or let go of the reins and let the designer do his job.

Clutter the design

White space is essential to good design. Pushing too much content above the fold and so forcing the white space out will wreck a design. Good design should have space to breath and as any art college graduate will tell you, the space between elements is as important as the elements themselves.

Design for a specific machine

What looks right on one PC will not look right on another. Browser, operating system, monitor, video card all effect how a site will look. Be careful that you don’t craft a design for a specific machine (either your own or the clients) but rather make sure it looks as good as possible across as many machines as you can test on.

Let technology dictate your design

If you want your site to look dull and boxy then just focus on the technological constraints. Good designers don’t worry about how they will build a site (at least in the initial stages), they focus on getting the look and feel right. Sure, you will probably have to make some compromises later down the line, but don’t start off that way.

In the news

With the summer over we are suddenly inundated with news:

Also in the show

I discover that I don’t know anything about Web 2.0 (at least according to this fun little site), we run down 10 reasons why you should get a Mac and discuss the infamous "this site is best viewed on…" message. Finally we review the best forum software I have seen for a long time.

Podcast 47: The mobile web

Posted in Classic shows on 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.

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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:

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:

Beginning JavaScript with DOM Scripting and Ajax

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.

atMedia: Real world application

Posted in Reviews on by Paul Boag

Yesterday I posted my thoughts on each session as I went along. Today I have decided not to post on each individual session but rather sum up the overall lessons to be learnt from this year’s show.

I have really enjoyed this year’s conference and have unsurprisingly learnt loads and met some great people. The trick is to now take what I have learnt and apply it to the real world.

This blog and podcast has always been aimed at two specific audiences:

  • Those that run and manage websites but aren’t web developers
  • Those that are web developers, but don’t have time to keep up with all the latest trends in this constantly evolving industry

A lot of what is written about web design is full of techno-babble and therefore incomprehensible to anybody who isn’t an ubergeek. The same is often true for web design conferences and atMedia was no exception. Discussions about WCAG 2.0, microformats and the DOM can often seem to have little relevance in the real world simply because they are not clearly explained in real world scenarios.

Bearing all of that in mind I have attempted to summarise the key issues raised from atMedia in such a way that they are relevant to the daily experience of the boagworld audience.

atMedia for website owners…

Pragmatic Accessibility

Probably the most depressing session at the conference was the one that discussed accessibility. I won’t bore you with the details, but sufficed to say the new accessibility guidelines that are currently being developed have some serious issues.

Many website owners have traditionally simply asked their web design agency to "make their site compliant with the accessibility guidelines". All they cared about was ticking the accessibility box so they didn’t get sued.

The lesson from atMedia is that you need to change that thinking. Accessibility needs to be more about finding the right solution for your users, rather than conforming to a generic checklist.

Are you more likely to be sued if you take this approach? No, not if you respond in a timely manner to any accessibility problems that your users identify.

Sites that work together

In the two atMedia conferences I have attended there has been more and more discussion about sharing information across multiple sites and in a variety of different ways. Whether it is turning contacts into downloadable business cards that can be taken into outlook or allowing events you show on your site to be published on other sites. Whatever the situation there are more ways than ever to share information. Not only is this an excellent way of getting your message in front of a larger audience it is also a great way of creating closer integration between websites.

Although this is still an evolving area I would encourage you to start thinking about what information on your site might be worth sharing and possibility some of the ways you would like to share it.

Also it is worth noting that there are a lot of other sites out there that allow you to integrate their content into your site. For example it is now easy to take Google maps and plug them right into your pages. In the closing panel of the conference the idea of sharing content between sites came out as the big area of growth over the next year, so it is definitely worth your attention.

Internet Explorer 7

Probably the most pressing issue for web site owners is the release of IE 7 within the next two or three months. It is vitally important that your site is checked in this new browser as changes to the way it works could mean that your site appears broken. Fortunately this is relatively easy to check by downloading the beta version of IE 7 and simply visiting your site. If you do spot problems, now is the time to contact your web design agency. But don’t worry, the fixes shouldn’t be that difficult or expensive.

More than just web pages

Without a doubt, the biggest shift in thinking between last year’s conference and this one, is in the area of web applications. What that means is that your website can now be more than just a collection of pages, but rather has the potential to behave more like a piece of software on your desktop. How does that apply to your site? Well, that depends. Let’s say that you have an events section. Instead of allowing users to click through a series of pages showing lists of events and then detailed information on an individual event, you can now show it as a calendar very similar to the one found in outlook. The key is that it is no longer necessary to wait while a new page loads but rather that information can appear instantly in the same way it would in a piece of software on your desktop.

Now it is worth saying that it is early days for this kind of technology and you might want to wait for the cost of development to come down. However, it is worth having a long hard look at your site and thinking about where it might be appropriate to add richer interactivity.

This isn’t the most straightforward of concepts to grasp so if you are left wondering what I am talking about then don’t panic. We will cover this subject in more depth later. However to get you started check out Google maps and then compare it with a site like Mapquest. Notice how on Mapquest everytime you zoom in or out the page reloads, while in Google maps it all happens without the refresh.

Don’t underestimate branding

Although this isn’t a new concept, it was really driven home in one of the sessions: you get what you pay for. It came up in a discussion about design and that great web design takes time. Often web design companies will cut corners on design in order to stay within a clients budget. This is unfortunate as research highlighted at the conference demonstrated that users make their mind up about a site based largely on how it looks. Once those first impressions have been formed it is very hard to overcome them no matter how good your content is.

The lesson to be learned here is that when you are looking at a web design companies proposal take particular note of how much time is dedicated to establishing the look and feel of your site.

Your site on a mobile phone

Without a doubt delivering the web through mobile devices like mobile phones is going to be a big growth area over the coming year. Already there are three times more mobile phones than personal computers, the vast majority of which can access the web. The question is; do you need to worry about this yet as a website owner? Well to some extent that depends. The key thing that came out of this conference is that mobile users want very different content from a user sitting at a PC. The chances are a user isn’t going to want to know about your company history while shopping in the high street. However they might be interested in comparing prices if you run an ecommerce site.

Even if you have content which might be useful to mobile users the current barrier to entry is very high. With so many mobile phones out there and so many different browsing experiences, creating a good mobile website is very difficult.

My advice is simple… wait. Wait for the industry to mature and standards to emerge. Although the mobile web is an exciting area it is early days and now is not the time for the majority of organisations to enter the market.

atMedia for busy web developers…

New accessibility guidelines: Don’t worry YET

So you have just begun to get your head around the WCAG 1.0 guidelines when you hear that the second version is about to be released. Don’t panic, you don’t have to worry about them just yet.

To be honest, it became quickly apparent from the session on these guidelines, that they are in a mess and not yet in a fit state to release. Even the accessibilit
y experts are havin
g trouble understanding them so I really wouldn’t waste your time at this stage.

The emphasis should be on creating the most accessible site you can irrespective of any particular set of "rules". That isn’t an excuse to slack off, but it should be seen as an opportunity to be pragmatic about the approach you take to accessibility.

Time to learn Javascript

If I had one message from last year’s conference it was "now is the time to learn standards". This year the message is "get your hands dirty with Javascript". Javascript is, without a doubt, having a real renaissance and it is a skill you should definitely develop whether you consider yourself a developer or a designer. More and more of your clients are going to be asking for some of the cool functionality that is found on the so called "web 2.0" sites and as these are mainly driven with Javascript you will need to brush up your skills. But beware, make sure the techniques you learn are up to date and that you get your head around concepts like unobtrusive Javascript, graceful degradation and progressive enhancement.

Preparing for Internet Explorer 7

As I am sure you are already aware IE 7 is going to be launched in the next couple of months. What you might not know is the new browser is going to be pushed out through windows update so you can expect this to become the dominant browser very quickly. Obviously this is an excellent opportunity to get some extra work from your clients (unless of course you are an in house designer in which case it is just extra hassle – sorry!).

In order to make the process of testing and fixing sites as painless as possible Microsoft have produce a set of tools for preparing for IE 7. Among them is an expression finder, useful for finding all of those annoying IE specific CSS hacks which may no longer work in IE 7.

Open data

From Google Maps to Microformats, there are more and more ways to share data across multiple sites. This kind of data sharing was seen as the biggest growth area for the coming year, so it is something that is worth learning more about. I couldn’t possibly begin to cover the many opportunities in this post but it is definitely an area to start researching.

One of the simplest places to start is with the subject of Microformats. Microformats are simply a consistent way tagging content across multiple sites. Because data is marked up in a consistent manner it can be identified by other systems and used.

The simplest example is the hCard which allows you to markup your contact information on your website in such a way as to make it readable by other sites and applications.

I know it may all sound very confusing but it’s actually very simple and very powerful. Definitely worth checking out.

Pricing design

One of the sessions at the event focused on what makes design great. It was presented by some of the best designers around and yet their answer was incredibly simple. Great design takes time. You need time to consider and tweak a design. The creative process just can’t be rushed. If you are anything like me, the look and feel of sites that you work on don’t get the priority they deserve. With so many time consuming tasks within an average project, design is often the first to suffer when the budgets are tight or the deadline is looming.

Although it is not easy, the moral of the story is that if we want to make our designs truly exceptional, we need to build more time for design into our projects. If you work out how to do that without sending the budget through the roof then let me know!

Designing for mobiles

Although designing for mobile devices is a huge growth area and you may well find clients interested in mobile sites, proceed with extreme caution. The session here at atMedia confirmed my worst fears about developing for mobile devices. There are approximately 40 different mobile browsers and over 160 different devices. Support for XHTML and CSS is minimal and designing for the mobile web is a very different beast to designing for the PC.

And so it ends

So that’s about it. A great conference. Thanks to all that were involved in presenting and putting on the event. It was incredibly enjoyable and had a great friendly atmosphere. If you missed out on atMedia then don’t panic. The podcasts will be out soon and you can still come to d.construct in September (for a fraction of the price!).

@media is almost upon us

Posted in News on by Paul Boag

Well I have just received my email from Vivabit giving me all the details about next week’s @media conference and it has finally made me look through the list of sessions. I have to say I feel like a kid in a candy store.

I have been intending to write a post on my hopes and expectations for this years @media conference for the last few weeks. However, it wasn’t until today that I have had a chance to look through the list of speakers and the subjects they will be tackling. And what a list it is!

Last year’s conference was a real turning point for me. I had become weary of web design and lacked inspiration and motivation. Listening to others enthuse really set me on fire again and led to this blog and subsequent podcast. So as you can imagine my expectations for this years conference are unrealistically high. However, the list of sessions did nothing to tame my out of control enthusiasm. It is as if somebody has asked me to list all of the areas I am passionate or concerned about and then made it into a 2 day conference.

Here is the list of sessions that have fuelled the fire of expectation:

Bulletproof Web Design

As somebody that has only recently embraced fluid design (as you can tell from this legacy site) I can’t wait to hear what Dan Cederholm is going to say to help people &#”;let go of pixel precision&#”;. My hope is that Dan can help me deal with some of the frustrating issues that arise from designing with ems and percentages.

The fine art of web design

I have been going through a bit of a stale patch with design for a while now. I feel like I am always having to fight clients to get anything other than the most mundane designs past them. Sometimes it is easier just to churn out the same old mediocre crap when you are faced with a difficult client. However, I am hoping that this session will put some fire back in my belly and make me fight my corner a bit more.

Fine Typography On the Web

Dave Shea’s presentation on typography looks intriguing if nothing else and I cannot wait to hear what he has to say about the state of online typography. Can we really be moving away from Verdana and Arial? Is there really a magic solution I am unaware of?

Mobile Web Design

I am interested to hear what Cameron Moll has to say on the subject of designing for mobile devices, as I have heard so many conflicting messages from &#”;just remove the stylesheet&#”; to &#”;mobile design is to web design what web design is to print&#”;.  It’s an area that I keep meaning to investigate in more depth because I believe clients will soon by requesting this from us as a matter of course.

The New Accessibility Guidelines: WCAG 2.0

Now this is a panel with a lot of potential!  Following Joe Clarks article on the subject I am hoping for a hugely constructive debate… that or a good old moan. I am open to either!

Don’t forget to say hello

To be honest I could have listed pretty much every sessions . How all of this is going to be crammed into two days is beyond me.

Anyway if you are going make sure you come up and introduce yourself. I will also be at the pre-event bash on Wednesday night so it would be great to see you.

Book recommendations

Posted in Reviews on by Paul Boag

One of the most common questions I get emailed with is “what book would you recommend for XXX”. As I find myself continually recommending the same set I thought I would post a list of them here.

Update: Just a quick note to say that I have updated this post with some new books and will try and continue to do so in the future. Please note that this list only contains books I have personally read so bear in mind there maybe better books out there :) If you can’t be bothered to periodically check back then you can always subscribe to my booklist feed on delicious

Build your own website the right way using HTML and CSS

This snappily named book is written by Ian Lloyd (of accessify.com) and is perfect for those starting out in web design. This book will teach you how to build websites from scratch. No previous knowledge required. What is more, as the title says, it shows you how to build them "the right way". A refreshing change when compared to most web design books out there.

Buy Build your own website the right way at Amazon

The Zen of CSS Design

This book is basically made up of a series of case studies based on designs found at CSS Zen Gardens. In my opinion it is ideal for developers who are trying to improve the quality of design on their sites. The book is a mixture of CSS tips and design advice.

Buy the Zen of CSS Design at Amazon

CSS Mastery, Advanced Web Standards Solutions

Andy Budd’s book is perfect for those of us who have been using web standards for a while. We know the basics and are looking for advice to make us more efficient in our coding. This book is packed with all of the techniques you would expect plus some extra tip bits that make you slap your forehead and wonder why you never thought of doing things that way.

Buy CSS Mastery, Advanced Web Standards Solutions from Amazon

DOM Scripting

Jeremy Keith gives Javascript a new lick of paint, calls it DOM Scripting and blows your mind with its potential. If you are a designer who has always shied away from Javascript then this book is a must read. Jeremy teaches you Javascript from the ground up and then shows you just how much it can enhance your design.

Buy DOM Scripting from Amazon

DHTML Utopia: Modern Web Design Using Javascript & DOM

If you already know the basics of Javascript then Stuart Langridge’s book is probably a better bet than DOM Scripting. Stuart teaches you all the latest techniques of unobtrusive Javascript and throws in a bit of AJAX for good measure. Probably a bit heavy going for your average designer but easy fodder for you hard core developers.

Buy DHTML Utopia from Amazon

Designing with Web Standards

If you need convincing about all of this web standards rubbish then Zeldman’s book is for you. This book will give you the history of web design and explain why we have ended up designing with tables. It explains why web standards rock and then gives you a whistle stop tour of the basics. A must read for anybody starting out in web standards.

Buy Design with Web Standards from Amazon

Web standards Solutions

Of course once Zeldman has convinced you of the value of standards and got you doing the basics, you are going to want to get into the details. That is where Dan Cederholm‘s book comes in. This handbook covers every conceivable area of CSS based design and shows you all the tips and techniques. You will find yourself thumbing through it regularly.

Buy Web Standards Solutions from Amazon

Getting things done

This book has nothing much to do with web design but I would high recommend it anyway. Getting Things Done provides great advice about organizing your life to make your more efficient both at home and at work. Also a lot of what he covers is directly relevant to running successful web projects.

By Getting Things Done from Amazon

Laws of Simplicity

Again not directly about web design but invaluable none the less. This book talks about simplicity in life, in work and in design. The principles laid out in this book are a template for good design. If you design user interfaces you should read this book.

Buy The Laws of Simplicity from Amazon

Bulletproof AJAX

I think the best way to describe this book is as the sequel to DOM Scripting. Where DOM Scripting taught designers Javascript, Bulletproof AJAX takes you the next step on. I have to say if you have read DOM Scripting there is a lot of repetition in this book but nevertheless it is worth the money

Buy “Bulletproof Ajax” (Jeremy Keith) from Amazon

Don’t make me think

If I could recommend a single web design book then I think it would be this one by Steve Krug. Zeldman’s book on Web Standards is a close runner but this book covers the fundamentals of user centric design. You learn why usability testing is so important and are even taken through the processes of running a session. It is down to earth, practical and at times very entertaining.

Buy “Dont Make Me Think” at Amazon

Prioritizing web usability

Jakob Nielsen can be a bit full of his own self importance at times but he definitely knows his stuff. If you can work through the first chapter where he tells the world how clever he is then you will find a very valuable resource with lots of real world examples.

Buy “Prioritizing Web Usability” (Jakob Nielsen) at Amazon

The Tipping point

The Tipping point is not about web design but is a must read anyway. It talks about the concept of ideas and products going viral. How do some products or trends suddenly spread like wildfire? How do you make that happen? It discusses how small changes can have a big impact. Its invaluable to web designers because it shows how reaching the right audience and presenting information in the right way can have a profound impact on the success of your website.

Buy “The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference” (Malcolm Gladwell) at Amazon

Mobile web design

This book takes the principles of web standards and applies them to the mobile web. Cameron Moll discusses the different approaches to taking the web mobile from doing nothing to creating mobile specific websites. The book really does tell you everything you need to know to start building mobile websites in only 100 pages.

Buy “Mobile Web Design” (Cameron Moll)

Podcast 23: Defining your project

Posted in Classic shows on by Paul Boag

This week on boagworld.com Paul and Marcus discuss the need to define clearly the scope of your web project before rushing into the build.

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Podcast: Download (18.8MB)

Download this show.

TechnoBuster: Semantic code

Semantic code is a term that is thrown around a lot at the moment, but what is it and why should you care? I try to explain to Marcus in very small words what it’s all about!

Check out our article on this subject

Main feature: Scoping your web project

Carefully planning your website before you start to build might not sound like the most exciting theme for a podcast but it is fundamental to a successful website project. I know from bitter experience that not doing so can lead to a world of pain for both the developer and the client. In this weeks show we share loads of tips that we have learnt over the years. Here are just a few of them:

Take the long view

Many clients force agencies to start projects before they are fully prepared, either because they are unwilling to pay for a scoping phase or because they have a tight deadline to meet. This kind of short-term view does nobody any favours. If a project is not properly defined at the outset, it will inevitably lead to slippages and additional expense. A developer needs time to understand the requirements before they begin to build. If they don’t, they will be unprepared when they encounter unforeseen technical issues.

Everybody has to sign off

Having a statement of work that everybody has signed off on is a great way to ensure client, developer and designer are all singing off of the same hymn sheet. It avoids miscommunication and misunderstanding by clearly defining what is going to be delivered.

Do you really need that?

The scoping phase should not only identify what tasks need to be done, it should also take a long hard look at what functionality is being considered. If you are not careful, your statement of work can turn into a wish list of functionality rather than a considered document which factors in return on investment. Ask yourself, if I spend all of this time building a certain piece of functionality, will it pay dividends for my organisation.

Be specific

It is easy to be vague about your scope, but if you do, there is room for confusion. The statement of work should cover everything from how many design iterations there should be, to what browsers the site is going to be tested on. Make sure your list of tasks is as detailed as possible, that way you will avoid any nasty surprises half way through the project.

Phased development

Don’t be afraid to phase a project especially when faced with a tight deadline. If your website has to be live by a certain date, it might be wise to leave out some of the "bells and whistles" until post launch. It is easy to forget that your website should be an evolving animal that can grow over time. After all, saving some of the functionality and rolling it out later gives you a good PR opportunity.

The hidden technology killers

Beware of those little technology issues that are so easy to overlook. For example, pay particular attention to which browsers you are going to support and what accessibility level you will be conforming to. Finally don’t forget to factor in time to deal with those extra style sheets for print, mobile or low vision users.

Web resources: Getting your layout right

This week I picked two sites that help designers develop the perfect layout.

Web Design Practices
A great site that shows you the trends in layout based on an analysis of several hundred websites. This site answers invaluable questions such as; "where does the search box normally appear" and "do most sites use side or top navigation?"

Although slightly out of date and centred largely on ecommerce sites, this is still an excellent resource. However, remember, just because a lot of sites do something a certain way doesn’t make it good practice!

Layout cookbooks
Have you ever had a client who knows what they like when they see it? If so, send them over to the layout cookbook and get them to look through the hundreds of different screen layouts available there. It’s also a great place to get some inspiration when you feel like all your designs are using the same basic layout!

Web standards explained

Posted in Development on by Paul Boag

Today I have once again been working on the new Headscape site (yes, one day it will be finished I promise). One of things I did was write a brief introduction to web standards and I thought you might want to see what I have written.

For years, web designers have been secretly holding together your site with sticky tape and string. The code that underlay many sites looks like some kind of HTML soup with random nested tables and font tags roaming wild. However, things are changing… there is now a better way to build your web site.

Enter web standards

Web standards are about completely separating content from design. This means that the content on your site is held in the HTML and your design is defined by a special CSS file. This allows the content to be described semantically in the mark-up rather than being cluttered up with design elements.

So this:

<font color="#FF0000" size="6" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif"> This is a heading </font>

becomes this:

<h1> This is a heading </h1>

Now isn’t that tidier, at least us geeks think so.

Why should you care?

It is important that your site is built using web standards because it offers you:

  • Better accessibility – Sites built with web standards find it easier to conform to disability legislation
  • Better print facilities – Have a separate print style designed especially for printing. No more badly printed sites! Try printing this page to see what we mean.
  • Backwards compatibility – Web standards ensures that your site will be useable on any browser no matter how old.
  • Delivery to multiple devices – By separating content from design you can deliver your content to a mobile phone or a touch screen kiosk just by changing the design.
  • Increased speed - Web standards produce cleaner code and smaller files. These download quicker increasing the speed of your site.
  • More flexibility - Because design is controlled by a small set of files, it is possible to quickly and easily change the look of your site without a complete rebuild.
  • Improved search engine placement – Search engines do not care about design, they only care about content. By separating the two, it makes it easier for the search engines to understand your site.

Avoid the sticky tape; make sure your web design company builds this way.