Tag Archives: UX

141. Feedback

Posted in Classic shows on by Paul Boag

In this week’s show, Paul Annett joins us to discuss how he pushes the boundaries of CSS and we look at how to improve your website through user feedback.

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News and events

Working from home

I suspect the vast majority of people listening to this podcast spend at least some of their time working from home. In today’s world, doing the type of work we do, there is no reason not to.

However, home working is not the utopia some believe. It has its own challenges and problems. For me it is a constant sense of guilt that I am not pulling my weight in the business. For others it is a lack of motivation or fighting the distraction of housework and family.

With some many of us struggling with the relatively new environment of home working it is great to see people sharing their experiences in a new A List Apart article (Working from home: Readers respond).

This article has some great advice and although it contradicts itself in parts (different people deal with home working in different ways) it is full of ideas that I either already implement or will be soon.

While I am talking about A List Apart I want to quickly mention "Progressive Enhancement with CSS". This is a follow up article to "Understanding Progressive Enhancement" an article we mentioned in an earlier show. It is a great article that explains one possible technique for ensuring your CSS squeezes the best out of as many browsers as possible. If you have a chance, give it a read.

Everything you know about CSS is wrong

Talking about CSS, yet another book on the subject has been released this week. However, this one is different. Written by Rachel Andrews and Kevin Yank, "Everything You Know About CSS Is Wrong" is aimed at web designers who already know CSS well. The emphasis is on emerging techniques and future CSS support.

I haven’t read this book yet (although I do have it on order), but it looks very exciting. It has been a while since I have got to experiment with CSS and so this will hopefully point me in the right direction.

It tackles subjects like Internet Explorer 8, CSS tables and CSS3. These are all topical subjects and so the book appears to have a lot of potential.

I will review the book once I have read it and we intend to get Kevin on the show to talk about some of the techniques.

Reduce your business costs with free stuff

With the economy in tatters and a general sense of impending doom, we are beginning to see posts on how to cut cost and tighten belts. One such article is "Reduce Your Business Costs With Free Stuff" on the Think Vitamin website.

The article is a mixture of ideas on how to save money in your business. Some will save you thousands and apply only to larger companies, while others save only a few pounds a month. However whatever type of business you run, from a humble part time freelancer to a multi-national design agency, there is something in here for you.

Ideas include:

  • Cutting costs on your phone system without reverting to VoIP
  • Subletting office space
  • Open source versions of basecamp, Microsoft office, campfire and much more
  • Moving email and hosting in house

Although I think some of the suggestions are somewhat short term (Managing email internally would quickly become an expensive headache) I generally agree with most of what is suggested.

If you are beginning to feel the squeeze then this one is worth the read.

HTML Email: What mail clients are people using?

Finally this week there has been an interesting evolution in our understanding of HTML email clients. This has been nicely summarised by Alex Walker on the Sitepoint blog. He writes:

There are lots of reasons for hating HTML Email, but perhaps no#1 on most people’s hit list is having to produce HTML Email to deliver to potentially hundreds of different mail clients and configurations.

Now, clearly it’s completely impractical to test your work on hundreds of mail rigs, but the question is, where do you draw the line? Generic browser usage statistics are reasonably common, but mail clients stats?

In the past you could confidently make up whatever numbers you liked on those question without fear of being caught out. But that may be changing.

Litmus, who produce an excellent web-based browser and email testing suite are now publishing email client usage statistics from their new Fingerprint email analysis system. It makes very interesting reading.

Alex goes on to summarise the key findings which include:

  • 60% of people use web based clients
  • Just over 80% of the HTML email market is dominated by Outlook, Hotmail and Yahoo!
  • Business still generally stick with Outlook although they seem reluctant to upgrade to 2007

Interesting stuff.

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Interview: Paul Annett on Pushing the Boundaries of CSS

Paul Boag: Joining me today is Paul Annett from clear:left, good to have you on the show Paul.

Paul Annett: Thank you very much. Nice of you to have me here.

Paul Boag: So Paul is, with a few others from his company, the people who really make clear:left happen, rather than Andy and Jeremy and Rich, which we know, well Richard does work, but Andy and Jeremy certainly don’t do anything do they?

Paul Annett: Well, you know, they fly around the world a bit you know?

Paul Boag: Yeah that counts. I guess..

Paul Annett: No, we all chip in, obviously. Everyone does their fair share, so we say.

Paul Boag: Very diplomatic of you. I feel like I can insult them over this as I do the equivalent of no work in my role as well.

Paul Annett: I was going to say… Well there’s eight of us at clear:left, yeah we all just chip in. We’re all caught making the tea, that sort of stuff.

Paul Boag: Cool. Well tell us about your role. What is it you do at clear:left?

Paul Annett: Well, I’m a user experience designer. So that means, well it’s more than just making a web site look pretty, which were are accused of sometimes in the trade; to make sure that the sites are easy to use, as well as a pleasure to use really. That’s something that’s often overlooked with some web site design companies, obviously none of your audience.

Paul Boag: Obviously not.

Paul Annett: It’s a vital ingredient in the mix really. My job does overlap with some of the other guys in the office. Basically, we all know each other’s jobs fairly well so we chip in and share some responsibilities. My main focus is UX design. We’ve also got the others guys doing information architecture, they tend to start the project off with handing over wire frames or prototypes to me. Then once I’ve finished my bit I then hand over the designs to our front end developers who then code up the HTML and CSS. As I say we do overlap a bit more than that but that’s basically how it works.

Paul Boag: I’m quite interested in how that works. You are saying you don’t do too much HTML and CSS, or how does it work.

Paul Annett: I don’t do a lot right now, I used to when I was freelance before joining clear:left. I used to do pretty much everything on a project. I don’t do a lot now; I don’t really have time to. The occasions when I do get time to are when we are working on our own projects. I especially seem to have had a bunch of project holding pages or client holding pages in the past where Natalie and Jeremy who do the front end are busy doing other projects and we need to just get something up there while the design is being made. So I will code up that kind of thing. I don’t really get to work on a lot of the big life projects, but then I’m no where near as proficient as Natalie and Jeremy are at those kind of things. I think they would have a fit if they considered my code going live.

Paul Boag: See that’s quite interesting, isn’t it? You’ve begun to build a bit of a reputation as somebody that does-I don’t know-CSS embellishments for want of a better word on some of your designs. You know the kind of thing that other web designers go oh. The most kind of well known example would be the Silverback holding page where you have the clever resizing background How did that come about? Where did that idea come from?

Paul Annett: It comes from… it’s fortune, really, that I happened to be building that page because it was one of the holding pages. I always look for something unusual to do, or something that’s going to catch someone’s eye, that kind of thing. That particular technique was quite appropriate because the site has quite a niche audience, in terms of web designers. People who wouldn’t necessarily pick up on the subtleties and things that I like that are in there, they’re like hidden gems, wouldn’t care. Web designers seem to catch on to that, it’s something they haven’t seen before. The particular technique itself was just a happy accident, really, because I virtually designed the site, it’s a very simple little holding page with the gorilla icon, designed by Arch Nemesis podcaster, John Hicks.

Paul Boag: Well he designed our logo as well so he can’t be that arch nemesis

Paul Annett: That was fantastic drawing on it’s own. But then when I put the vines there, I was just thinking finally give it some kind of depth. I was fiddling around with some of the CSS, and because I don’t know, this is a benefit, because I don’t know CSS like the back of my hand. I do sort of dip in and out. I might make mistakes. Those mistakes might accidentally do something that makes me go oh hang on maybe I can actually use that for something, which is what happened in this case. I happened to position the only layer of vines that I had a percentage off the screen. It moved in relation to the grid. That got me thinking, well maybe I can do this with multiple layers of vines. I didn’t think much of it at the time, but I happened to mention that I had launched the holding page on twitter and a few people.

Paul Boag: All hell broke loose.

Paul Annett: Yeah the few people that follow me thought oh that’s nice and they twittered it, and other people twittered it. Before we knew it, a day later, we had 25,000 views on the web site and we were thinking wow we’ve hit something here. 50% of those people signed up for more information about our product, which it didn’t even exist yet, and the web site didn’t even say what it’s about. So they were just intrigued to find out more based on the what they had seen.

Paul Boag: So that caught you very much by surprise then?

Paul Annett: Oh yeah We were kind of overwhelmed. If it had been, in an anyway, some kind of planned INAUDIBLE machine, then we would have waited until we had actually started building the app probably. We had over 10,000 people signed up for something we were thinking we’ve really got to pull something out of the bag here. Hopefully we did.

Paul Boag: Well you do have very good feedback on it. That really demonstrates well the power of design, that even something that, let’s be honest, is maybe, gimmicky is not the right word but you know, isn’t fundamental to the functionality of the site, yet had a huge marketing impact. So it was very worthwhile.

Paul Annett: Exactly. These things, they are gimmicky. They’re things that people come back to and play with and just want to fiddle around and look at it again. They don’t mean anything. The idea is that they entertain me and maybe some other web designers. It just happened that it entertained 25,000 web designers.

Paul Boag: Is this something that you do regularly? Do you sneak things like this in a lot?

Paul Annett: It is something that I like to do, as I said, to entertainment myself. But I do now look for places where I can sneak these things in. I think I’ve always done it really. I always strive to do something unusual. Back in the days of my freelance site, which is nice-design.co.uk, which is still there but not updated since IE8 so if you are using IE8 it will break. Even then, that was one of the first sites where the header and the sidebar were fixed and it was only the content that scrolled. It’s an unusual thing to see, other than the framesets, obviously, back in the day. I always try to sneak these things in. And when I’ve been working here at clear:left, last year’s de-construct site where we snuck in an Easter egg. There’s a style switch on it, I don’t know if you saw it, but when the site launched it was like a wire frame and along the top there a time line which said the progress of the site as it was being built. It was played as if it was being built live as the event got nearer. The time line at the top was actually a style sheet switcher and we deliberately hid the mouse cursor and made it not look like a bunch of links so that if people found it by chance then they would be pleasantly delighted at the surprise of these extra designs on the site that they’d found. Actually we had a few people email us and say terrible usability, they don’t look like links and the mouse cursor doesn’t look like a hand when you move over them. They kind of missed the point, it wasn’t supposed to look like a link, it was supposed to be a hidden little gem for people to find. That got good feedback as well.

Paul Boag: It’s that creating a sense of satisfaction from a user that they found something special or you know, it’s that little bit of wow factor.

Paul Annett: Yeah. When people are then able to say their friends oh go on look at this, then they feel like part of an exclusive little club of people that are in the know. Definitely.

Paul Boag: You talked a lot of the Silverback example of how basically that came about because you were fiddling with CSS and then something didn’t behave as you expected it to and you saw some potential in there. So that was very much a technology driven way of coming to it. Is it always like that or are sometimes these things planned in from the start. I guess in others words, do you have the ideas and implement them or how does it happen?

Paul Annett: It really varies. Sometimes it’s design driven, like with the de-construct site last year, that was design driven and we wanted to have something which resembled the process that building a web site out there. The silverback one was kind of technology driven but also slightly design driven because I wanted to give it that depth. To take that one step further, I’ve used the same technique on the UX London site. UX London is another conference were running next year in June, uxlondon.com. The technique that I used on silverback is reimplemented there. There’s no three dimensional movement or anything like that, but as you resize the window, the logo changes color. That’s just done by having a transparent window through the logo in the shape of the U and the X, so as you resize the window, the background color behind the whole page slides sideways and changes the color of the logo. This kind of this could be done with Flash, it could be done with Java Script, but I don’t know Flash, and I don’t know Java Script, so it is me trying to find my own little work around and quirky way of doing things really.

Paul Boag: I guess the thing that you know when you start thinking about these things is browser support. Some of these things you are doing are kind of either very advanced CSS or very hackerish CSS so either way you come up with browser support issues. Do you worry about that or is it just that they’re extras and it doesn’t really matter.

Paul Annett: Well fortunately because the audience for the sites that we’ve done in this sort of extreme way are web designers so you know they are going to be using the latest browsers. They’re going to be using firefox and they’re not going to be using IE6. We wouldn’t go to that sort of an extreme on a client web site and everything that we do, everything that leaves our doors is valid CSS, valid HTML. It wouldn’t be allowed not to be if you know what I mean. We’re very standards aware as a company, but I do like to kind of push the boundaries on things a little bit and see what I can get away with. Not in anyway inaccessible, but just not very conventional and if it doesn’t work in IE6 and doesn’t work in other browsers then as long as we implement something that looks the same but without the effects then that’s fine. The silverback site, if you look at it in IE6 is just a gorilla in front of some vines, no movement, nothing lost. Nobody coming to that site will be like there’s something missing here, but they just won’t get that extra little embellishment.

Paul Boag: It’s that graceful degradation.

Paul Annett: Progressive enhancement really. Most people that do have the technology get the extra stuff. This isn’t a company policy, but personally I’m usually in the favor of, I’ve seen quite a couple of sites recently that had a browser upgrade nag bar where if you’ve got IE6 then it says hey just upgrade your damn browser, you’re missing out on stuff. We’d never do that, we wouldn’t put that on a client site here, but I might put that on my own site. I haven’t, but I might.

Paul Boag: Sounds like a good idea to me. What’s the kind of process you go through in getting these extras added in? Are they kind of planned in from day one. When you, say for example, did the UX London web site, did you have it in your head right from the beginning that you wanted to do this with the logo, or something occurred to you further down the design process? When did it happen, is it in the design stage, the build stage?

Paul Annett: With that particular one, that was something that I tried out on a previous site. It didn’t really work 100% and we thought we’ll do something else with the site. But I had it in the back of my mind that I wanted to do it from the start on that project. But in general, again it varies really. If, sorry to be so vague and unspecific.

Paul Boag: No no, that’s the nature of design isn’t it?

Paul Annett: One thing I do advocate is that with all our client’s stuff, as well as our own stuff, I always present mock ups in a browser. I never send out a JPEG of mock ups to clients because for start, they are going to view it at the wrong size, they are going to look at it in preview or some kind of windows equivalent, image viewer, and it’s going to be resized to fit their screen, so they’re not going to see it in the context of the web site anyway. Not only that, but it also gives you the opportunity to actually build part of the site so you might have the header as a flat JPEG and the footer as a flat JPEG and the left hand side as a flat JPEG but the right hand side, where you want some kind of interactivity, you could spend a little bit of time building that so that it kind of explains to the client that this is what I want to happen here, roughly. Obviously it wouldn’t be the final thing because you don’t want to invest that much time up front, to give them that little bit of insight. That’s what I do when I am building holding pages or whenever I do get the opportunity to do something like that in house here is that I’ll code up some bits I think is the unique, gimmicky bit of it, and all the rest will just be a flat JPEG. It’s just to sell the idea internally, if you like, and to have everyone gather around my Mac here and ridicule me and laugh at you.

Paul Boag: It makes sense that more and more web design that we are doing these days has got so many interactive elements with use of Java Script and various other things, that a static JPEG doesn’t always cut it anymore does it?

Paul Annett: No, exactly. Another thing we do to combat that here at clear:left is that we often build prototypes of a site, instead of having like a paper wire frame which we often do as well but if there are interactions that need to be explained to the client we’ll build a flat wire frame of it in HTML just using framework and Java Script libraries and simulate the AJAX side of things just with hard coded Java Scripts. It’s also not production quality code, but the prototype wire frame and the flat JPEG combined will give the client a better idea of exactly how the finished site will be.

Paul Boag: Sounds good. We’ve talked a couple of time about is this gimmicky, is this not you know… I’m quite interested as where you feel the line is drawn between good design here and tipping into that naff gimmick area. Do you know what I mean?

Paul Annett: Yeah. There are a couple of things that haven’t seen the lights of day yet, which maybe they will one day. I guess it depends on how much time it’s going to take and how much value it gives us at the end of the day. Using a similar kind of thing with positioning elements we’ve got these great big letters in the clear:left office and we regularly rearrange the letters that spell clear:left to spell different words on the shelf at the office. To simulate this online I’ve built a little page which has got the word clear:left across the page when it’s at full screen at 1024 pixels wide and as you resize the window all the letters swap places because they’re all positioned at different places at different percentages off the screen, blank bits of image and all this complicated CSS positioning going on. When you reach 800 pixels wide it says elf:cartel. So it doesn’t have any fundamental reason or… it doesn’t do anything, it’s pointless, so it’s not going to be anywhere probably. But that is too, possibly gimmicky. There are some ideas which are not necessarily web based which are gimmicky but do work like when we were planning this year’s de-construct and INAUDIBLE wants to get some silverback promotion in there. I talked to him why don’t we just have a gorilla one day running around dishing out silverback branded bananas. Everyone laughed and thought it would be stupid, and then we did it. And then it was really successful and everyone loved it. Yeah, it was a bit of a gimmick but again it kind of fitted with the brand so it worked.

Paul Boag: It’s a fine line isn’t it, you walk in things like that? Because you know you could have been absolutely ridiculed for something like that. How do you know what is going to go down well and what’s not? I guess you don’t.

Paul Annett: Yeah, luck. I was ridiculed for that here in the office but we went with it and it seemed to work. It was great fun.

Paul Boag: I’ve seen pictures. It looked entertaining if nothing else. Going back to the online stuff, even if you develop something like that, it never sees the light of day, you never know that technique may come in use in a future web site that you develop and it might be appropriate.

Paul Annett: Yeah there’s always like a library of that stuff that we’ve kind of half developed and ideas that we’ve got, notes, that kind of thing. It might well see the light of day in the future

Paul Boag: Let finish off with just a kind of general advice that you like to give designers out there that they look at some of the cool little things that you do and they think I’d really like to do that but I don’t want to just go out and copy him because there’s nothing imaginative in that. I want to kind of get into that mentality of looking for opportunities to do this kind of thing. What advice can you give them? How can you start them off?

Paul Annett: There’s loads of stuff that’s come out as a result of the silverback hype, if you like. There was an article that I did on ThinkVitamincom which kind of explains how to achieve that technique. People have taken that and done all sorts of other things with it. I’ve seen someone creating moving 3d images and that style of a zoetrope(?) toy thing, which uses the same kind of principles but applied in a different way. So by all means, the best advice in all cases of web design is to look at the code, see how someone else has done something and see how you can adapt that to your own stuff. One thing that I really rely a lot on is, especially in these hidden Easter eggie things, is alpha transparency and thinking of how you can create a window through the front layer of a web site so you could have, instead of having a white background on the web site, put a white foreground layer with a window through it, shaped in the shape of whatever, and see how you can make that interact with the background layer so as you perhaps scroll down the page something becomes visible through this previously invisible transparent window. There’s a site called webleeddesign which does this brilliantly. That’s my ultimate, I would have loved to have made something like that, it’s really good. Only that one page, but it’s really nice with that alpha transparency in the front there. Think about what you can do with resizing the text on a browser so-we redesigning the clear:left site at the moment, hopefully it will be online soon-now I’m giving up an Easter egg that’s coming up on it.

Paul Boag: No one listens to this podcast so it’s fine.

Paul Annett: There are certain things hidden on certain pages and if you bump the text size up a couple of points then those things would become visible because of course you can control the position of things based on ems. As you resize things, your font size gets bigger, it perhaps moves in relation to the other things and things begin to peak out from behind something that was previously in front of it. I play around with that kind of thing a lot. That’s the advice I’d give you in terms of this particular way of doing things.

Paul Boag: That’s some great advice there, there’s lots of possibility. I like what your saying that it only takes a small number of techniques, you talked about transparency there, you talked about the background stuff, and you talked about the font resizing, but the possibilities of just those three things are endless really. You could do all kinds of things with them.

Paul Annett: Exactly, combine them in different ways. Again someone take this and do something with it, but imagine a line going diagonally across the screen but in font of that you’ve got a completely white page and across that white page is a very narrow slot of transparency, so if your line starts at the top right hand corner all you see is a dot in the top right hand corner but as soon as you start scrolling down the screen, that dot moves to the left because it’s visible through that hole. That’s a very basic example of how you could use windows of alpha transparency interacting with the background to do something which moves horizontally as you scroll vertically. I haven’t done anything with that yet as I haven’t thought of anything good to do with it but maybe someone can.

Paul Boag: That’s absolutely brilliant Paul, there’s some really good advice in there and thank you for taking the time to come on the show. I hope we can get you back on before too long.

Paul Annett: Thanks. Thanks very much for having me.

Thanks goes to Troy Oltmanns for transcribing this interview.

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Feature: Improving your site with user feedback

Users can be invaluable when deciding how to move a website forward. We should always listen to what they say. However, sometimes that is easier said than done. Read more here.

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134. Chrome

Posted in Classic shows on by Paul Boag

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

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News and events

Managing and choosing fonts

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

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

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

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

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

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

jQuery supercharges menu rollovers

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

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

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

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

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

Can Google Chrome Topple IE?

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

More on my thoughts can be found here

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Feature: Choosing a Hosting Company

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

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Review: dConstruct

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

John: Hi I’m Marcus Lillington.

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

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

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

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

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

John: No that’s right.

Teifion: I thought I was a bit unfair.

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

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

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

Teifion: Oh there was Matt and Matt are hilarious.

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

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

John: My favorite talk was Tantek on microformats.

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

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

Teifion: Just keep going Paul does.

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

Teifion: I’ll definitely agree with that summary.

John: Although a little long winded.

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

John: Yeah that’s true.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Teifion: No I’m a graduate.

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

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

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

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

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

Teifion: I don’t think she heard me.

John: No she just blanked you.

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

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

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

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

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

John: Unfortunately I don’t.

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

John: Good idea.

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

John: Brilliant. Was that the pause?

Teifion: Yes a good long 30 seconds.

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

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

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

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

John: Teifion

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

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

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

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

Teifion: Where is Stanton?

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

Teifion: chatting up randoms.

John: Yeah that sums it up.

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

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

Teifion: Bye.

John: Bye.

Thanks goes to Curtis McHale for transcribing this review.

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130. Air

Posted in Classic shows on by Paul Boag

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

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Housekeeping

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

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

News and events

Designing for emotion and flow

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

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

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

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

7 essential guidelines to functional design

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

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

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

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

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

15 companies that really get corporate blogging

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

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

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

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

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

Learning from signage

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

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

Some of the gems he discovered include:

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

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

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Interview: Johnathan Snook on Adobe Air

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

Johnathan: A pleasure to see you there as well.

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

Johnathan: Absolutely.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Johnathan: No, absolutely not.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Johnathan: Awesome. Thank you very much.

Thanks to Aaron Cooper for transcribing this interview.

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Listeners feedback:

Getting a feel for accessibility

Our first contribution is from Kenneth and is about accessibility:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Turning problems upside down

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

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

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

Problem: You want to increase traffic to your website

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

Some ‘off the top of my head’ Solutions:

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

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

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

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

122. Screencasting

Posted in Classic shows on by Paul Boag

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

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News and events

Typography everywhere

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

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

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

The list could go on.

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

Accessibility cheat sheet

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

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

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

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

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

Advice on wireframes

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

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

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

Top five tips for new web designers

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

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

The tips include…

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

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

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

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Feature: Creating Screencasts

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

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Interview: Ian Lloyd on Sitepoint HTML Reference

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

Ian: Hello Paul!

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

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

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

Ian: I’ve heard my dulcet tones before.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Paul: *Laughs knowingly*

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ian: Sorry Paul.

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

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

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

Ian: Ah yes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Paul: Nobody is beyond hope.

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

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

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

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

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

Paul: There you go then.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ian: What luck “HTML SUCKS!”?

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

Ian: Yeah something like that.

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

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

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

Ian: OK. Thank you very much Paul.

Thanks to Lee Theobald for transcribing this interview.

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Listeners feedback:

Can you trust developers?

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

  • Inaccurate estimates both in cost and time
  • A lack of commitment to carry out all agreed items within a scope when it takes longer to accomplish than originally planned.
  • The need to ask for more money when the scope doesn’t change.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The life cycle of a website

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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116. Back

Posted in Classic shows on by Paul Boag

Returning with a new site. Jeff Croft talks about his view on web standards and we discover why the personal website is dead.

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News and events

Creating grid layouts

Last month I attended the Future of Web Design conference. The speakers were exceptional, however my favorite was a presentation by Jon Hicks on his web development process. The guys at Carsonified are slowly releasing the videos so it wonʼt be long before you get to watch it yourself.

I find it interesting to see how people work and it is amazing how many new techniques you learn. One thing Jon shared was a Javascript library called GridLayouts that overlays a grid systems on top of your pages. This is useful when creating layouts directly in CSS because you can align elements to the grid.

I have since discovered there is a firefox extension called GridFox that does the same thing.

Flash goes open source

Of course, you might be wasting your time designing with CSS. According to Aral Balkan flash is soon going to be everywhere and is the platform we should now be developing on.

The reason for Aralʼs excitement is an announcement by Adobe that Flash is going open source. Not only will the swf format be open source, they are also relaxing the licensing on the flash player.

All of this is good for the flash platform. Although it is never going to replace HTML, it does undermine one of the main arguments used by its detractors.

Accessibility and AJAX

While Flash gets a shot in the arm its main competitor AJAX is under attack. Brothercake has written a passionate article for Operaʼs development site pleading with us to stop using AJAX.

His argument is that AJAX is immature and unnecessary in the majority of cases. He believes that the accessibility cost of using AJAX outweighs it benefits (many of which are oversold).

I cannot say I agree with everything he has written, but the article does make you pause and consider whether your implementation of AJAX has been entirely necessary. Coming within days of the WCAG 2.0 candidate release, I think this article puts accessibility firmly back on the agenda. It will be interesting to see what affect WCAG 2.0. has on the growth of AJAX and web 2.0.

Developing effective forum leadership

Our final news story is anything but web 2.0. because it focuses on the oldest of community tools, the forum. It is an article by Patrick O’Keefe entitled Develop Effective Forum Leadership.

The article is aimed at those website owners who run larger communities and need to provide guidance to their community leaders. I have worked with so many large organisations who have tried and failed to effectively run communities. Their failure is often down to bad decisions concerning moderation and management.

This article helps to address those issues providing solid advice. If you are a community manager or have clients who run (or want to run) a forum then this is a must read.

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Feature: The personal website is dead

This week Zeldman mourned the decline of the personal site. Several responded rebutting the claim. In this weeks feature I explain why I agree with Zeldman but just don’t care.

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Interview: Jeff Croft Talks About His View On Web Standards

Paul: OK. Joining me today is Jeff Croft, who no doubt you have heard of. Good to have you on the show Jeff

Jeff: Great to be here Paul, thanks for having me.

Paul: So you work for Blue Flavour, and I have to confess the reason why I wanted you on the show is because you do tend to court a little bit of controversy, shall we say, is that a fair comment?

Jeff: I suppose that’s a fair comment. I don’t necessarily do it on purpose, but it does seem to keep happening!

Paul: Well you say you don’t do it on purpose, but I’ve looked through your blog, and you have some excellent articles on there that are really good and really quite excited me. Not necessarily because I agreed with every word

Jeff: Sure

Paul: But what I like about what you do, Jeff, is that you challenge kind of the standards, you know, you challenge the standard thinking and you kind of come at things from a different angle. So…

Jeff: Right

Paul: As a result of this, you seem to have antagonised a few people, especially in the standards community. Why is that? What have you done and why…why do people find you so annoying, Jeff?

Jeff: Well I was going to ask you that same thing Paul!

Paul: Ha ha ha

Jeff: No, seriously, it’s a good question. Like I said, I won’t ever set out to antagonise anyone. I think sometimes, you know, people take opposing viewpoints on these industry matters, a little personally, that’s, you know, my opinion. I know I write in kind of a pointed way that sometimes is blunt and I tend to be the type of person who doesn’t always have a filter when maybe I should. But, you know, I love everyone in this community, everyone I’ve ever met in this community’s been awesome so I’m not…it certainly isn’t ever personal, but I think, dealing specifically with web standards, it sort of feels a lot like religion to me. Like I sort of see myself as a Protestant of sorts, like I…you know I came up as a firm believer in the dogma of web standards, but more recently I’ve sort of split off from the Church on a few key points, but in the end, I mean Catholics and Protestants are both Christians, right? And we read the same Bible which is, I suppose, designing with web standards, and so you know, just there’s….I usually sort people there’s probably 5% of stuff that I differ on than kind of the purist viewpoints. So I’d see it as a purist versus pragmatist sort of thing
and I like to write about it and I like to write in a kind of a blunt way that I guess sometimes rubs people the wrong way.

Paul: So you’d like to call yourself a pragmatist. Tell us a little bit about where you, you know, what areas you think that other people are being too purist over when it comes to web standards. What are the areas that get under your skin?

Jeff: Well the main thing is just that I don’t really consider…I never think of web standards as the end goal. I think of web standards as a means to the end, and so, you know, when I’m building a website my priorities are, you know, to serve the needs of the client and to create a great user experience, more than my priorities are to validate or to, you know, use all the right ….most semantic elements all the time. I mean I do try to do that, but it’s…those are just in support of the greater goals that I have and I think…sometimes I feel like peoples’ priorities get a little out of whack there, and that’s kind of the purist mentality that I’m talking about.

Paul: I mean the trouble is with writing posts like this, and this is something I get accused of as well, that when you say something like, well web standards, you know, are not the goal, they’re merely a means to an end and all the rest of it

Jeff: Right

Paul: Aren’t you actually encouraging lazy coding?

Jeff: Well I don’t think so. I can see how it seems that way. I mean I definitely do believe that everyone should be writing valid markup and CSS and I just encourage people to remember that web standards are simply tools to advocate, you know, to help achieve the end goal, and you know, if you’re…I don’t know, I guess it’s kind of hard to explain, but if, like…let me use an example. If you’re building a house, I don’t think anybody would have their goal be…I need to use a hammer, and nails and bolts when I’m building this house. I don’t think that would be anybody’s end goal. Their goal would probably be like, I’m going to build a house that is structurally sound and has spaces that serve the needs of the residents and it’s comfortable and it’s aesthetically pleasing. They’d probably have goals like that. And you know, they probably would use a hammer, nails and bolts, but I don’t think they’d probably get so bent out of shape about, well in this house I used, you know, 3½ inch long nails instead of 3 inch nails, but those are the kind of like sort of semantic and pedantic debates that we get into in the industry a lot that irritate me a little bit because I feel like sometimes people just don’t pay attention to, you know, somebody can redesign a site that can be beautiful and amazing, and they make a blog post about it, and they say, you know, this is a new project I’ve done and it’s got all this new innovative stuff and the comments on it are, well you didn’t encode your ampersands and you know, you used too many divs and just to me I’m just like, man you totally missed the point, you totally missed all the great stuff that is there about my site.

Paul: But I mean using your house example that you just gave

Jeff: Right

Paul: I mean, within, you know, construction there are standards. There are, you know, rules that have to be followed and it may be the case that the person that’s getting their house built for them doesn’t…don’t particularly care about those things, you know, they care about the aesthetics, they care about the living space, they care about that kind of stuff, but somebody has to care about, you know, the fact that it’s built to Fire Regulations and things like that. Is that not our job as a Designer to worry about things like that?

Jeff: I think it’s completely our job, I just think that it is our job to …to do those things and to create great user experiences and have beautiful designs and…and it’s mostly just a priorities thing, like it’s just…I think all those things are important. Validating and creating, you know, writing semantic mark-up, all these things are important to me, they’re just… they’re just tools that I use to reach greater goals is all….and I think some people in our industry have turned that around to where they are more interested in writing valid code than they are in creating great experiences.

Paul: Mmm. So do you actually think that there are situations where the, you know, these different objectives come into conflict, because you know, I can’t say that in my experience there have been many situations where you know, I’ve gone, you know, oh I can’t do that because it’ll make the code invalid or whatever, you know, where…or where, you know, I’ve had to over-rule a client because I feel that it would compromise, the, you know, the semantics of the website. They don’t often seem to come into conflict, but I mean do you disagree?

Jeff: No,….no I agree, they’re very rarely in conflict if ever. It’s…you know, it’s more what irritates me and what I have talked about is more it has to do with the discussion and the kind of….community, you know, within the web standards community it’s not something that really affects client work too much or anything like that, it’s just I want to talk about some other stuff; I want to talk about design and I want to talk about users and I want to talk about community and networking and bringing people together and sometimes I feel like those conversations can’t be had because they’re…because as soon as somebody starts to talk about something a little bit more abstract and conceptual, people derail the conversation by saying, again, like your ampersands are unencoded, or you know, why did you use all these divs when you could’ve, you know, been more semantic, or you know, whatever. So….it’s more about the conversation…yes

Paul: I’ve got to say, I can associate with your point of view, I mean at the moment I’m re-building the Headscape website, our corporate website, and you know, although obviously I should primarily be thinking about the client all the time and potential customers that are coming along to the site, after all, that’s the target audience, but you can’t help but almost be a little bit afraid, you know, that …oh is this code of good enough standard, are people going to criticise this, that and the other, and really you shouldn’t have to live your life in fear of what your peers will say.

Jeff: Exactly, that’s exactly wha
t I think.

Paul: But I mean from the point of view of…we were talking about lazy coding weren’t we, and about, you know, does this encourage lazy coding. You guys have taken an interesting position at Blue Flavour, and I have to say this…this is something I think I probably disagree with, which is that you guys use Blueprint, which is the CSS library, actually in a production environment. That’s interesting that you take that point of view. Explain a little bit about how you came to that…that point, you know that position.

Jeff: Well…well first of all I was sort of involved in the creation of Blueprint. It was…I was accidentally involved; I didn’t mean to be, but at my previous job I had…I had created a sort of CSS framework for us to use internally, it was a media company, a newspaper company and we had several different newspaper sites. They were all similar and we had a team of designers and we wanted to just sort of standardise on some….some class names and just some ways of coding things across our sites and across our team, so that you know, we would all kind of be on the same page, and I wrote an article on a A List Apart about that process and somebody found…somebody went and found that code and wrote me an e-mail asking if they could use it, and I said sure, I can’t support it, but if you want to use it, go ahead, and thinking that they were probably going to use it on their personal site or whatever, and it turns out what they’re actually going to do is build Blueprint. So that’s kind of how the whole thing happened and…so that’s how I got involved in it and I gotta say before I go any further that since then, Blueprint is very different from what I wrote and there’s been a lot of changes, and a lot of them are good but a lot of them I don’t like too, so I don’t….at this point in time I’m not as sold on Blueprint as I was three or four months ago just because of some of the changes they’ve made. But I think the reason, I mean the justification to me for using Blueprint or any CSS framework like that is the same justification that you would have for any Open Source project. It’s really good CSS written by smart people that has been tested by the masses, it’s constantly being updated, having bug fixes applied, and you know I believe that most of the time the Open Source community is going to be able to write better code than you or me or any one individual person, so to me that’s the justification, it’s the same reason I would use Apache or Django or Rails or Linux or anything Open Source because it’s just been proven time and time again that….that Open Source methodology works for having good code.

Paul: I mean, I have to say, I had a look at it and played with it for a bit, and I’ve got to say that for some stuff it was very impressive, you know, if you’re putting together wireframes or, you know, doing initial production work then I can see a value in it, but I think what concerned me was some of the limitations surrounded the fact that, you know, it’s designed primarily for a fixed based site, but also…sorry, is that…am I wrong?

Jeff: No, no, you’re absolutely right, although I think adding liquid is on their ‘to do’ list, but yes,

Paul: OK. And then…I mean the other thing was that, you know, I’m trying to avoid using the word ‘semantic’ in order not to get in trouble with you, but I mean the thing that did strike me with it is that there were a lot of class names that you were having to put in, you know, which is fine, you know, I can accept that, you know, it’s not the end of the world if you do that, but you know, if it’s a site that’s going to be around over the long term, I just felt it was a little bit of a second-rate solution for probably the type of clients I do. Now I can understand that if you’re doing, you know, a lower…you know, lower end work, smaller websites, with less of a budget and you need to turn things around quickly then this is better than not using standards at all, but it just felt a little bit of a lightweight solution. Am I being unfair to it?

Jeff: Nope, I don’t think you’re being unfair at all. I think you’re absolutely right and I think, you know, I mean at Blue Flavour, we have used Blueprint before, we don’t use it all the time, and it is…we do tend to use it in those situations where we have a very tight timeframe or a very tight budget, and just need to get things done and get them out the door as quickly as possible. Because like you said, I mean we think it’s a good solution that is better than not using web standards at all, but it’s…it’s never going to be as good as hand-crafting every line of code for, you know, for the particular project. We recognise that, but it’s, you know, sometimes in the real world, when we have deadlines and clients and budgets, sometimes just getting things done on, you know, an efficient way trumps being absolutely perfect every time which is again that pragmatist versus purist sort of view.

Paul: I mean it felt like a bigger compromise, and maybe…I’m using some other, you know, frameworks and libraries, you know, I just jQuery for example in JavaScript, and this felt more of a compromise, more of interfering with the kind of underlying content of the site, and that’s what I was probably slightly uncomfortable with, was the idea that, you know, the content would be in some ways compromised if the site was going to be around a long time, you know, if it was a shorter term project that maybe wasn’t around as long, then the fact that the content is somewhat compromised maybe is not as big a deal.

Jeff: Yeah, well I think, you know, when you were saying that I was thinking, you know, like you use jQuery, so do I. I think there’s a certain…like…those of us who are not great JavaScript people will lean on these frameworks, whereas I bet JavaScript gurus sometimes have the same feelings like about…it being a compromise when using one of those libraries, you know, and there’s probably people in the Ruby community that say, ‘oh, I’m not going to use Rails, it’s a compromise’, because they really know the ins and outs of Ruby or they really know the ins and outs of JavaScript and we really know the ins and outs of HTML CSS so yeah, I wonder if it’s always …these kind of libraries are always going to be a little more popular with people who are…who are like have to use CSS but it’s not really their primary area of expertise.

Paul: So what you’re implying is that I’m a snob?

Jeff: Sort of!

Paul: Ha ha ha…..that’s fair enough, that’s OK. I don’t mind being a snob! So I’ve….so moving on from that then a little bit

Jeff: OK

Paul: Now I’ve read some stuff that you’ve written before critical of validators and you know, some of these automated validators that are out there. Maybe tell us a little bit about why you’re critical of them, why you feel so anti towards them?

Jeff: Well it’s not so much that I’m opposed to the validators, I mean on the contrary actually I use validators almost every single day. What I’m critical of is the way people use them sometimes. I think that, you know, validators are there for…as a tool to help you de-bug during the development process, you know, you have some problem on your page and why isn’t it working? When you validate you find the error and then that helps you move along to solving it. But what irritates me is the use of validators as sort of in unprovoked attacks on other peoples’ code, you know, where again, it’s kind of that same…that same mentality of somebody launches their new site and the first thing somebody does is view source and validate it, so that they can then make a comment that says, you know, this is crap, and that is…that is really irritating. I feel like there’s almost never any reason to validate someone else’s code, I mean unless they’ve asked you to, I can’t understand why….it’s just that mentality of the first thing you do when you get to a site is view source is a little baffling to me, because I’m…I’m more interested in the design and the functionality and what are they doing here that’s new and interesting.

Paul: I guess…but that depends…surely that depends on your priorities, I mean…you know, I find it quite interesting to look at other people’s code and how they’ve built the site. It doesn’t necessarily mean I’m going to validate it.

Jeff: Right, and….no and I mean that’s fine, I do that at times as well and that’s certainly how I learned a lot of what I know, but I don’t do it with the intention of then picking apart every single error they made publicly, which is really the thing that bothers me.

Paul: I have to say the other thing that concerns me a little bit about this is I’m starting to see more clients going and viewing source and validating websites and you know, it’s quite difficult, because I mean obviously like yourselves, we kind of sell ourselves on, you know, being standard based designers and produce good quality code and all the rest of it; it’s part of our sales package. And you know, when a client goes along and validates one of our client sites and it’s invalid, you know, you feel like you have to defend yourself in some way, but, you know, there are good reasons why a site won’t validate sometimes, and…and certainly once a client starts using a content management system you can pretty much kiss goodbye to it can’t you really?

Jeff: In many of them, yeah.

Paul: OK. That’s…it’s interesting to hear a little bit about the way that you operate and the kind of priorities that you have at Blue Flavour. In some of the posts that you’ve put up, I mean you were kind enough to send through a big bunch of your more controversial posts to me which was good. And I was reading through some of them, really enjoying them by the way, but there seemed to be this kind of under-lying current that maybe standards and even the W3C to some extent, a kind of stifling innovation. Where does this kind of feeling come from, you know, is that something you really, really believe and what makes you believe it?

Jeff: I would say again it’s not so much that I think that the W3C themselves or the standards themselves are stifling innovation; it’s the culture of compliance that is around those standards and around the web standards community to where people are so obsessed with being valid and being compliant all the time that they…you know, they tend to…I think it even extends past actually writing mark-up or writing CSS to where people just keep doing things the same way that everybody else is doing them or the way that Jeffrey Zeldman told them is the way to do things, or whatever, and it just kind of….they just keep doing things the same way and not innovating as much as I would like to see. Now I say that, and I…but I know I probably do the same thing myself, like I don’t…I’m not always incredibly innovative either, so…so it’s kind of, you know, it’s a balance there. But I think….I think also, I mean…and this might be a little bit of difference in my viewpoint too, is when I really thing of web standards, the web standards movement, I think about the browsers. I think the…gold web standards movement was to get the browsers all rendering standards correctly and supporting standards, which for the most part has been done, I mean granted there are still little problems here and there, and IE isn’t totally there, but at least we know that they’re on board now. I don’t think of web standards movement so much as being a thing where we’re getting the developers all on board. I mean I guess that’s part of it too, but when I think about the web standards movement when I was, you know, when I was first involved in it four or five years ago or however long it was, to me it was all about the browsers, and so, you know, today I think there’s a sort of chicken and egg problem where…browser makers could be innovating and doing cool new things and the one that consistently has done cool new things is Webkit in Safari, I mean they’re adding the CSS3 properties and they’re adding, you know, they’re coming up with properties of their own and adding them and they’re…and they’re doing it, I mean today we have this name spacing, right, where they can say, you know, it’s going to be hyphen webkit hyphen border radius or whatever, so they can keep it out of the, you know, it’s got its own name spaces, kept out of the global area so it doesn’t conflict with anything else, and I would just like to see a lot more of that kind of innovation from browser makers where they’re trying these new things, they’re throwing them in, they’re letting developers play with them, and like I said, it’s kind of a chicken and egg thing I think where the browser makers would like to do this maybe, but they’re afraid of the backlash from the standards community. If they’re adding new properties that aren’t part of a spec, you know, the standards community is…has proven that it’s going to backlash against them and it’s going to say, ‘why did you add this, this isn’t in the spec’, and so then they don’t do things, but the developers and designers also would like to try new things but…so it’s kind of a chicken and egg thing there a little bit I think. So that’s the…that’s the main …the main plan I have on that, and the, you know, like there are examples, like X….sorry, XML HTTP request or Ajax, you know, was a pr
oprietary IE property that they just put in, and eventually got standardised, and that’s kind of the way that I would like to see it go more is where the browser makers are doing new things and then we’re trying to standardise them, which is the opposite I know if, you know, some really respectable people and friends of mine like Jina Bolton and Andy Clarke which see that it should go the other way, which is that specs are written and then browser makers standardise on them, so…

Paul: Yeah…I must admit, listening to you talk kind of fills me with a certain level of dread, to be honest, when you talk about browser manufacturers. You know, I studied…I studied designing websites back in ’95, and you know, and so I lived through this whole period of time where you have browser manufacturers, you know, introducing all kinds of bizarre tags and it was absolute chaos, you know, and you didn’t know what was happening on what browsers. What’s to stop that happening again, beyond the standards community growling in the corner aggressively?

Jeff: Yeah, well I mean that…I mean I was there for that too. I studied also in ’95 and yeah, it was pure chaos. But I think, you know, I mean first of all I think the standards community has made a lot of inroads to where these, you know, I don’t think it would be complete chaos simply because we understand the value of standards now. And there are some…there are some mechanisms in place like the name spacing I’m talking about, where they can do these things and keep them from conflicting with other…so when …when WebKit decides they’re going to add border radius property, they can do it under dash webkit dash border radius, so that if anybody is actually using the real border radius without a, you know, prefix, you know, there’s no conflict, so I think, you know I just feel like there’s some mechanisms in place that would keep it from being so chaotic and the value of standards we’ve learned through the web standards movement, you know, and the browser makers are now on board with the idea of inter-operability, I think would keep it from being so chaotic, but I guess I don’t know for sure. It is…it’s definitely…there’s definitely a balance there because I definitely feel like the browsers have not been doing as many new things as they did back in those days, but those new things did cause problems too, so it’s, you know, but as a Designer I sometimes get bored, I’m like, I’ve played with all that stuff; I’ve played with all the tools we have and I want to try something different, you know, I want something that will…I want advanced grid positioning and, you know, I want to be able to draw shapes and, you know, it’s not out there.

Paul: I mean that is the only trouble I guess with…you know, you were talking about innovation and we need to be innovating more as Designers as well as browser manufacturers. The trouble with innovation to some degree is that you’re always in danger of undermining users’ expectations. I mean this is something you hear someone like Nielsen go on about loads. How…where do you feel the balance is between kind of doing cool new stuff and…you know, not undermining users’ needs or expectations?

Jeff: Well you’ll probably remember from back in the late ‘90s and that sort of thing that there was….and another sort of interest of mine is the sort of demise of the personal website, but back in those days, there was just so many experimental kind of crazy out there personal projects that were happening, and I think that that is a great place to try those things, because they’re not…they’re not real users accessing them; people that are using them are, you know, expecting that, I mean that sort of thing’s a great place to try new things, is on personal projects. Now again, with the culture of compliance that we have, I don’t know how that would fly today. Like if somebody made some crazy experimental site, I think there’s a certain fear of doing that because of backlash again from the web standards community, like you know, it’s a thing where people aren’t seeing the…the meaning, you know, it’s…I’m putting this out there because I’m trying to do something new and difference and …and it’s almost not allowed by the web standards community. Well, you can’t do that, because it doesn’t validate, or you know, whatever. And again, like I said, that’s not always specifically about validation and mark-up. It goes onto the…to that …into usability and into layout and design where people say, don’t change that because it’s messing with users’ expectations, but I think there are places where you can try those things and personal projects to me are the big place where you can try that.

Paul: You’ve got a good point about personal website. It’s like everybody now …have…you know, it’s all about blogs isn’t it, it’s all about….there’s almost this kind of citizen journalism thing where, you know, we’re all actually trying to create a little audience for ourselves and so therefore we don’t want to do anything too dangerous with our…with our personal sites. I remember my….my first personal site was absolutely chaotic, you know, it had no proper navigation whatsoever, but it was fun, it was a place I could experiment, so yeah…

Jeff: Yeah, that’s a real kind of…pet annoyance of mine is that …the loss of that, and I do think, you know, it’s because everything’s a blog, and I love blogs, and you know I have a blog, but I still wish that there was just a little bit more of that crazy experimentation that we had going on back then.

Paul: Mmm. I mean it’s a good point as well. A question I often get asked by people is, you know, how do I promote myself online. They say, I don’t want to…I don’t want to run a blog because I don’t want to write. Well you know, a personal project in a way you’re trying out different things like a sandbox you can play in. It’s a good way of promoting yourself and showing what you’re capable of, and that you do innovate without having to write reams of stuff, because let’s face it, not all of us are big writers, so….yeah

Jeff: Right.

Paul: Good to have your perspective on things. It’s really nice to have a kind of new perspective and you know, a different point of view, so great to have you on the show, and no doubt we will get you back in again in the future. Good to talk to you.

Jeff: Great. Thanks so much for having me.

Thanks to Anna Debenham for transcribing this interview.

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Listeners feedback:

Getting a site
off the ground

Shaun writes: Following the headscape redesign and promised boagworld redesign what tips can you give to getting a personal/own site off the drawing board/local machine and actually published.

The problem with internal projects is they lack motivation. They are never as important as client work because they donʼt directly generate income. The answer is to increase their perceived importance. I use a number of techniques:

  • Document the benefits to your business or personal profile.
  • Produce a statement of work just as you would an external client.
  • Price the project so that you can set it against your targets as a marketing cost.
  • Set a deadline and preferably announce that publicly so you are forced to meet it.
  • Block out time for the project rather than attempting to “fit it around” client work.

Ultimately it comes down to determination. However, knowing the value of the project and treating it as any other project really helps.

Testing

Erich writes: Thanks so much for the show, all the work you guys put in really shows. It is great learning about aspects of the business that I donʼt get to deal with much.

I was just wondering if you guys had any kind of a testing station at Headscape. We are looking at putting something like that together at my work. Somewhere you can just go sit at and run through all the browsers, maybe even some with different versions of flash and such. Do you guys run anything like that?

Because our designers are based remotely it is not easy to have a central testing suite. We did try that at one stage but it did not work. Connecting remotely wasnʼt as smooth as it should have been and we found multiple designers often wanted access at the same time.

Currently, each designer runs a number of virtual PCs on their individual machines. Most have two versions of XP one running IE7 and one with IE6. We also run multiple version of Firefox and Opera. Most of our designers also own macs allowing them to test Safari. Those that donʼt connect to a mac in the office.

To be honest our testing environment is not the most sophisticated. Most clients do not want to pay for testing against minority browsers and when they do we setup something specific for their needs usefully using a virtual machine. If you are interested in setting up your own Virtual Machines then I recommend VMWare Fusion(7) for the mac and Virtual PC(8) under windows.

 

112. Jina

Posted in Classic shows on by Paul Boag

On show 112: How to be more efficient using HTML snippets, Jina Bolton on women in web design and moving to a mac.

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News and events | Using HTML snippets | Jina Bolton on women in web design | Listener emails

News and events

Some customers are not worth caring about

My first piece of news is a post by Gerry McGovern. In his latest post he argues that some customer are not worth caring about.

The thrust of the article is that by appealing to everybody, you ultimately appeal to nobody. This is something I see repeatedly from clients who define their target audience as “the general public” or “men under 50.”

You also see it among developers who become overly concerned that people using IE4 with Javascript disabled might be unable to access the site. Even content providers suffer from this problem, dumping content on their websites “just in case somebody finds it useful.”

Ultimately building a website has to generate a return on investment and some customers don’t generate that return.

Version targeting rumbles on

Next up is two new articles on A List Apart, which once again tackle version targeting. Jeremy Keith argues against it, while Jeffrey Zeldman defends the position.

I have tried to stay fairly objective in my coverage of this issue. However, although I understand the position of people like Jeremy, I believe that Microsoft have done a good thing.

The arguments against strike me as somewhat naive and arrogant. We live in a world of compromise and yet as compromises go this isn’t a bad one. By adding a single line of code we have the ability to control how the market leader renders our sites. As Zeldman says…

Designers and developers should be popping corks, hugging each other, and weeping with joy. IE no longer sucks. No version of IE will ever again surprise us with unexpected displays or behavior.

Perhaps I am overly pragmatic, caring more about real world scenarios than purity of solution, but I am hopeful about the future.

Let users tagging your posts with delicious

The last news story is two posts from Christian Heilmann. The first is a Javascript technique that returns any delicious tags associated with the current page. This is a great way of introducing tagging to your site, without having to tag all of your own articles. The downside is that when users click on a tag, they are not taken to other articles you have written. Instead they see all delicious links associated with that tag. Good for the user, maybe not so good for retaining users.

The second post by Christian is another Javascript solution. This time he provides a mechanism for walking a user through the key features on your site. It generates an animated series of popup caption boxes beside different screen elements. It is definitely useful for showing off key features to new users. However, I have to wonder if a good screencast wouldn’t do the job better. Nevertheless, it is an interesting proof of concept. Check it out.

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Feature: Using HTML snippets

If you are part of a web design team or skip constantly between projects, then you might want to consider an alternative approach to writing your HTML. Discover how we became more efficient at Headscape by using HTML snippets.

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Expert interview: Jina Bolton on women in web design

Paul: Okay. So joining myself and Marcus today is Jina Bolton. How are you, Jina? Good to have you on the show.

Jina: I am doing well. How are you?

Paul: Yeah. Well, other than the weather that we just keep complaining about, things arenít too bad here. We are bearing up under the strain. So, for those of you that havenít come across Jina before, she is now an internationally renowned speaker

Jina: [laughs]

Paul: and author and incredible web designer. And is the kind of quality of person that is selected to appear at South by Southwest (SXSW) Marcus just for your interest that she is the kind of person they are looking for not you.

Marcus: You know, I know that because I got a magazine thing through by South by Southwest and there she was on the cover of it.

Paul: Ummm!

Jina: [laughs] Yeah. I got into a little for that too.

Paul: Why did you get into trouble for that? Who with?

Jina: The company I work or. Iím not really a speaker on behalf of that company, so

Paul: Ahhh, I see.

Jina: and they printed that company name by my name.

Paul: Right.

Jina: Anyway, different subject. [laughs]

Paul: Okay!

Marcus: [laughs]

Paul: And the company you work for will remain nameless and notorious for their strictness over things like that, so

Jina: Yeah.

Paul: There we go. But, basically yes Marcus. They want young attractive, intelligent and clever designer rather than an aging pop-star. Sorry about that.

Jina: [laughs]

Marcus: [laughs] I can live with it.

Paul: Yeah. Jina has been kind enough to let me come on her panel, so that should be fun shouldnít it? Iím looking forward to that.

Jina: Yeah, I think it will be great.

Paul: If we actually get our act together and organize it.

Marcus: But, Jina is obviously that much richer after you have paid her Paul.

Paul: Well yes. You know I did have to bribe my way on. But, it seemed to work, so that is good.

Paul: So, there are so many things we could have gotten Jina on the show to discuss. She seems to be talking a lot about CSS lately. Mainly just by putting the word sex in the title of everything she does, which seems to improve your ratings to no end.

Jina: [laughs] You found my tactic.

Paul: Yeah. It seems to work for you Jina, so thatís good. But we wanted to go for a little bit of an unusual subject. I wanted to really look at the role of women within web design because well letís face it, your kind of a rare breed in some senses Jina. There arenít as many women in web design as perhaps there should be. And I just thought that it might be an interesting subject. And Iím sure that you have some opinions on it and so maybe we can encourage I know that there are a lot of women that listen to our show that maybe havenít moved full-time into the world of web design and maybe youíve got some advice to offer. So thatís the kind of plans. Does that sound okay with you?

Jina: Sure.

Paul: Good. Okay, well letís kick off then just by asking a really kind of obvious question, but kick us off with this Do you believe that women provide something unique to the world of web design, and if so what is that? Is there actually a difference? Is there something that makes womenís role unique?

Jina: Ummm. Well I think that there is something unique being brought to the table, that personís own personal style because I think that men and women have the same skill set. Now of course there are a lot of women that have a feminine style, so they do bring that into play, but I think it is more style than it is the natural skill of designing itself.

Paul: Okay. So, do you believe that there are kind of genetic differences really? ëTheyí make all kinds of things for example that woman have better color perception than men, but men have probably got better 3D acuity and things like that. Do you think that that actually makes a difference? Or is that all so marginal, that itís not that big deal?

Jina: Well I havenít really thought about that to be honest. As for color, I donít know. I guess, you know, a woman sense of color perception is supposed to be more acute. Maybe they could bring better colors to the table, but I think the skill sets are pretty much the same. I guess, you know, a lot of men can design for men and men can design for women. I think the skill sets are the same.

Paul: Oh, okay. So you wouldnít believe say, for example, if there was a website that was primarily aimed at a female market that it should be a female designer that works on a site like that?

Jina: Ah, well. So I do think that a female designer would have an easier time knowing how to cater to a female audience because they are that audience. But I donít think that it would make the website design better. I think a man would be just as capable in creating for that female audience.

Paul: Ah, that is interesting. Marcus, what do you think about that? I kind of always naturally presumed that somebody is more capable of designing for their own gender.

Marcus: Iím surprised by Jinaís answer to be honest. But, thinking about it, it is something that you think ëYeah, it makes more sense for women to design for women.í but really itíd to do more with the content. I think it would be hard for a man to produce content for a site aimed at women. But maybe the design is something, like Jina says, is more the designers have a set bunch of skills and whether you are a man or a woman it really doesnít make any difference. So it is more of a content issue.

Jina: I do agree that it would be easier for a woman to do it, because like I said she is that audience so sheís gonna know what kind of things a woman would like. But, I donít think that would make the website design any better because a man would be able to do just the same.

Paul: Hmmm.

Jina: You know it is kind-of sort-of like to ëbring issues into ití. Like, I had a firm that was from India who was asked to design for the National Civil Rights Museum and his isnít African-American, nor was he even American, but he did a fantastic job. So, I think for gender it would kind of the same. Like, if he was African-American he probably would have had an easier time but he would still have been creative with the artistic part.

Paul: So basically, he had to work harder to achieve the good design, but he could still do it.

Jina: Right.

Paul: Hmmm. Yeah. I do see where you are coming from on that. You mentioned earlier about a kind of feminine style to design. Do you think there are differences in style? What would you class as being a particularly feminine style of design?

Jina: I think it is really color choices and font choices, as well as certain patterns like some designers I think of at the top-of my head *Vera-Ley* and *Legha Alfanterra* they both you know if you look at there websites they are very very feminine. You know my website is really feminine looking, but I think it is because of the colors theyíve chosen and the font choice weíve picked and as well as the patterns. I notice a lot of guys tend to go for the grungier things and the girls kind-of go for more of a clean look. But I think those are stylistic differences.

Paul: So when do you think that kind of where do you think that comes from? You know is that something that is trained into us? You know, blokes tend to go for grungiest stuff? Even from being a kid I guess ëboys are blueí and ëgirls are pinkí, you know, all that kind of thing.

Jina: [laughs]

Paul: But, how much of it is nature and how much of it is nurture do you think?

Jina: Ewe I have no idea. [laughs]

Paul: [laughs]

Marcus: [laughs]

Jina: But, I do think it comes from the way people are brought up like you said ëgirls are pinkí and ëboys are blueí. I think it is really what that person has come to like as they have grown up.

Paul: Hmmm.

Jina: To be honest, Iím not a real fan of pink at all

Paul: [laughs] Good for you.

Jina: but I use it in my website for some reason. [laughs]

Paul: [laughs] I mean yes. You see the trouble that you are making Jina, is that we are trying to make informed comments on this show and nothing that we ever say on this show is informed.

Jina: I think, this topic is kind of just subjective I guess.

Paul: Yeah. Basically you are saying that I picked a dumb subject. That is what you are saying isnít it?

Jina: No, no.

Paul: [laughs]

Jina: A good topic to talk about it, but it is kind of confusing.

Paul: Yeah.

Jina: You know and when I started out doing websites, I used to do websites for rock bands. And all of those sites I did were grungy so I am kind-of contradicting myself.

Paul: Ahhh. So I mean, I guess the big question is that whether you know obviously the industry that you have chosen is a male dominated industry. There are far more men out there. Certainly there are far more high profile men out there on the speaking circuits and writing articles and all of the rest of it. I mean do you perceive that as a problem?

Jina: I am not really sure if ëproblemí is the word. I do think it is getting better. I see a lot more women speaking now and even attending conferences. I see more and more women in attendance. And of course, more women writing articles in books, but I think it may have to do with that it is a fairly new field, in comparison to other design related fields. And so now that it is getting taught in schools, more and more women will start getting into it.

Paul: Hmmm. I mean that raises quite an interesting question. You know, how did you get into it then? From you know, what is your background and how did you end up being a web designer?

Jina: Well actually, my Dad was playing around with making his own personal website and I was intrigued by the idea of publishing to the Internet. So he kind of showed me really-really basic-basic HTML using font tags and tables.

Paul: Yeah.

Jina: I grew up as an artist so I went to art school and I was actually going to be a print designer, but as I was learning HTML it became my hobby and it just kind of merged and became my job.

Paul: Hugh. Okay, fair enough. It is just interesting to know. Okay, so do you think we should be you know you talked about that there are female designers learning at school these days on how to become web designers. Do you think we should be doing active as a community to encourage women to come into the profession? I mean, I know for an example, that there was a lot of talk at one stage about proactively discriminating in conferences to encourage there to be more women speakers. Publications need to make a point of using female authors in order to you know setup role models almost artificially. Is that something you would encourage or do you think that is a slippery slope?

Jina: I have mixed feelings on that. As a woman, I have definitely benefited from people that were looking for more female speakers or more female authors so it has definitely helped me. But, I think discrimination is sort of a fine line and if a guy is more capable and more skilled he really should have more of that opportunity than a woman who is not as skilled. I wouldnít want her to get in, just because she is a woman. But, the fact that there are more opportunities is helpful so I am kind-of on the fence on that one. It is sort of like the same way I feel, and I know this might be considered controversial, but the whole you know like when you get a job. Are you getting hired in my case, if I get hired because I am a woman and I am half Asian versus somebody who maybe is a White male, but who are a lot more skilled than me. I donít know how I feel about that. You know, I am all for more opportunity, I think that is a really good thing. But I think that any discrimination is discrimination.

Paul: I mean it is an interesting one, as somebodyís employer, and I donít know Marcus will feel about this but there are occasions when I really think we miss out as a company. I am sorry to say, we are an all male company, all thirteen of us. And not because we have gone out to be that, in fact precisely the opposite. Weíve often offered woman jobs and they have turned us down actually.

Jina: [laughs]

Paul: And it is a very sad reflection on us. But, I mean Marcus how would you feel about actively going out and saying ëRight, okay, we want to hire a female designer because we want that female perspective.í?

Marcus: I am not too sure how I feel about that, from an employment point of view. As an employer, I think you have to look at who is the best candidate. But what I was thinking about when we were talking about earlier, and this goes back to what I am not talking at South by Southwest (SXSW) this year

Paul: [laughs]

Jina: [laughs]

Marcus: and one of the reasons of why I am not doing that.

Paul: Itís because youíre White, middle-aged and middle-class.

Marcus: No, but one of the things the people who are organizing the panel have to look at different they have to think about ëOkay we are going to have a bunch of panels talking about business, a bunch of panels talking about designí you canít have everything. All the panels cannot just talk about business, for example. So you have to think, okay we will have to split it equally between the different types of genre, if you like. Now, doing that we also want to have an equal split between men and women, I donít think there is anything wrong with that. As an employer it is a different thing. I am not sure, where the law stands on that.

Paul: Ummm!

Marcus: Iím not sure we actually would be able to say we have to have a female employee, or whatever. I think you would be discriminating against other people by doing that.

Paul: Yeah, I guess you are. But, I think we are actually (I have to be honest) I think we suffer as a business to some degree. A classic example of that was not long ago we worked on a website for a higher education institution where over 75% of the people that went there were women. And we were having to do a design. We did the first design and we put it in front of bearing in mind all of our designers are men and we put in front of some test users and the overwhelming response back was ëYouíre trying too hard. You know it is kind of overly feminine.í And it would have been so much easier in that situation if we had a female designer there just to say ëGuys. You really donít need to make it pink and you donít need the little fairies in the corner.í

Marcus: [laughs]

Jina: [laughs] Exactly, you donít want to go with crochets with pink and flowers unless that is the brand you are going for.

Paul: Yeah, I mean that is a good question actually. Do you think there is any bear in mind there is a lot of male designers out there that are listening to this show what are the absolute no-noís? How can they design for a feminine audience without kind of really going over the top? You know, is there any kind of advice you can give, or is it just kind of feel as you go along?

Jina: I think you definitely want to get critiques from women, like if you have peers letís say you are working at a design agency and there are female designers around you, get their opinions. If you donít really have that, I donít know, I guess go to Starbuckís or something

Paul: [laughs]

Jina: and get some critiques because I am just up more for just keeping it simple and clean.

Paul: Yep. That sounds like good advice. I think we are going to have to wrap it up there Jina. Not because I am bored with talking to you, but because the sound quality on Skype sucks so much today. I think weíre gonna have to get you back on the show another time to share maybe some more stuff.

Jina: Okay.

Paul: I donít know, maybe when you are over in the UK that might be possible. Iím sure that it will happen before too long.

Jina: That sounds good.

Paul: Okay.

Jina: And it might even be our Internet connection. I am sorry about that.

Paul: Thatís alright, these things happen. I blame Marcus personally. I never have problems except for when he is on.

Jina: [laughs]

Marcus: Ha ha ha.

Jina: Thatís awful.

Paul: [laughs] Okay. Thanks very much for your time and we will talk to you again soon.

Jina: Okay. Alright.

Paul: Bye.

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Listeners email:

SXSW

This week we have a couple of questions about SXSW:

Rich asks…

I am attending sxsw for the first time this year. What should I expect and how can I get the most out of it?

Last year was my first year at SXSW and to be honest it is overwhelming. Before I went I planned out all of the panels I was going to attend but to be honest I wasted my time. I don’t think it is really possible to prepare for a 10 track conference. Ultimately what you go and see will be dictated by how much energy you have left after the various parties you were attending the night before!

Talking of parties, in my in my opinion it is the social aspects of SXSW that is really the most interesting. At the end of the day, you can find out about most of the topics covered online. However, it is meeting and chatting with other web designers that is the really inspiring bit. To this end I would suggest two ideas.

First, take time to just sit in the corridors and get chatting with people. If you are in a good conversation, don’t worry too much that you are missing the panels. Its amazing who you meet just sitting around. Oh yes, and don’t be afraid to introduce yourself to anybody. Most people are friendly and if they are not… screw them!

Second, if there are people you know already attending or if there are people you want to meet add them on Twitter. That way you can see where they are and what they are up to. As a newbie last year, twitter was how I found out where all the best parties were. Definitely add me as I intend to keep twitter up to date with my comings and goings.

Talking of parties and socialising Matthew asks…

Have you considered doing a live show at SXSW?

We have considered it but have decided against it. To be honest, sxsw is manic enough without adding a live show. What is more, I don’t think live shows are that interesting to those that are not attending. This means we will not be releasing a show on the 12th March. However, we will be recording as many interviews as we can cram in, which we will be using over the coming weeks and months.

Although we are not doing a live show, that doesn’t mean we wont have opportunity to meet up. Boagworld is once again sponsoring the Great British Booze up, which is happening on Monday 10th March from 7:30pm at Shakespeare’s Pub (314 E. 6th Street). Full details at http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/403331/

Moving to the mac

Brenda asks…

You mentioned on the Christmas list that you recently converted from Windows to Mac. How did it go? Did you have to buy all new software, or were you able to convert licenses for some of it? What was the learning curve like? What do you miss most from Windows? What would you say the overall budget for this was (emptying out that duct tape wallet)?

A very timely question Brenda. With Marcus intending to buy a mac, we have been discussing the switch. I have to say that for me it went very well. Within a week I was entirely happy working on my new macbook and could do everything I did under windows and more. I have certainly never looked back and can honestly say I miss nothing.

However, I confess I was in a luxurious position. Unlike most people I had Headscape to pay for the raft of software I had to purchase. Admittedly companies such as Adobe allowed me to transfer my license from windows to the mac (after jumping through some hoops). However, that was not always the case. Fortunately most of the software I purchased was only $30-40 each. However, that can quickly mount up. The biggest waste was on Microsoft Office. To begin with I couldn’t imagine life without Outlook and Word. In hindsight, I really didn’t need it. iWorks which costs a fraction of Office does everything I need and Apple Mail is a much more pleasurable experience than Outlook. I didn’t keep track of how much I spent on software, however I would guess it was $200-300.

Overall it was a great move and I love not only the mac OS but the great software being developed by some very cool mac developers.

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

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Ongoing role of a website manager

Posted in Web strategy on by Paul Boag

Although there is a general acceptance that a website manager is required to “make the site happen” (as in go live) there is little or no conception in many cases that there is an ongoing role there.

Many organizations and individuals simply underestimate the enormity of the job faced by website managers/owners, failing to grasp that it is an ongoing commitment. It is our job as web designers to make clients aware that running a website requires somebody to be responsible for it over the long term. Every website requires a website manager.

This lack of understand about the role of website manager probably explains why it is often a fairly unrecognized position despite the fact that the website itself is considered an important asset. Although there is a general acceptance that a website manager is required to “make the site happen” (as in go live) there is little or no conception in many cases that there is an ongoing role there.

It is almost as if there is a “build it and it will run” mentality, where the organization fails to grasp that a website manager is needed throughout the entire lifecycle of a website to ensure that it evolves and remains successful.

A good website manager need to be constantly fulfilling three roles…

  • Evaluating site objectives
  • Refining the site
  • Promoting the site

Evaluating site objectives

A website manager should be constantly evaluating the objectives of his website and asking if changes need to be made to its overall vision and direction. This kind of assessment does not need to occur on a daily basis but should be done at least every six months (more often if things in your organization move quickly).

These reviews should consider questions such as:

  • Have the underlying objectives of the website changed?
  • How is the site performing against its success criteria and do those criteria need to change?
  • What is the competition doing and how are we performing against them?
  • How has the target audience changed and what response are we getting from them in regards to the site?

Refining the site

On a more practical level the website manager should also be refining the site in response to changes in these objectives. If the success criteria for the site are not being met, then steps need to be taken to address the problem. Equally, if the competition is luring away your visitors then the site needs to be altered to encourage them back.

This continual “tweaking” of the site can manifest itself in three different ways:

  • Changes to the front end interface of the website
  • The addition, deletion and editing of written content
  • The introduction of new functionality

For example a luxury holiday booking service might respond to increased competition in the sector by adding a flight price comparison tool to the site (new functionality). A tool like that is very appealing to some users and will draw them away from the competition. Equally, they might look at adding regular reviews of existing destinations (new content) to encourage users to keep coming back. Finally, they might refine the design based on user feedback to make it easier to navigate and improve legibility (changes to design).

Responding to user feedback is often the best way of refining the website, which is why ongoing usability testing, polling and analysis of site stats is so important.

Site promotion

Although it is possible to get online marketing specialists to help with the promotion of a website I have seen some organizations fail to allocate budget to this task. As a result it often falls to the website manager to pick up the promotion of a site.

Site promotion needs a definite ongoing commitment. The number of visitors coming to your website will slowly decline if you do not actively promote it.

You can promote a website in a number of different ways.

  • Offline promotion – Offline promotion includes letterheads, business cards, signage, phone systems and other marketing collateral.
  • Email marketing – Email can be a powerful marketing tool to drive new traffic but also a good way of encouraging existing users to return to your website.
  • Search mechanisms – Search mechanisms are more than good placement on Google. It also includes pay per click campaigns and social networking tools.
  • Guerilla marketing – Guerilla marketing is a catchall term for lost cost marketing methods. It includes techniques like forum speeding, viral marketing, blogging and even podcasting.

Site promotion requires more than mere lip service. It needs dedicated resources (either internally or externally) on an ongoing basis. It is important to decide early in the process who is going to be responsible for this work.

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 84: Maybe

Posted in Classic shows on by Paul Boag

On this week’s show: Paul explains why Headscape does Design Testing, Marcus talks about growing your web design and Mark Buckingham provides an introduction to Search engine optimization.

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Pagination 101

I came across a great post this week that provides a solid introduction to producing pagination. If you haven’t come across the term pagination before it refers to the navigational elements that allow you to move through multiple pages of results. They often include links marked previous and next or numbers to allow you quickly to jump to a specific page of results.

We use pagination all of the time and most websites seem to have them. However, they are an overlooked function that doesn’t get the attention they deserve. The post I found this week, entitled pagination 101, explains to the reader through examples what make pagination work. Although I am not convinced I agree with everything written here it generally provides some very sound advice.

Personally I love posts like this that cover very basic stuff. It helps remind us not to get so caught up in the cool stuff that we neglect the fundamentals.

Free CSS based design course

John Allsopp and Maxine Sherrin have released a free online course that introduces people to CSS based design. If you are still to make the switch from table based design or are finding the change challenging then I would highly recommend this course.

We are not talking about a short introduction here. Rather, this is an in-depth course that builds up over a series of weeks into a comprehensive guide to building with standards. Not only does the course tell you how to build with standards it also explains why which in my opinion is just as important.

Zeldman says no to Maybe

I wanted to quickly mention a post I saw from Jeffrey Zeldman this week. Its not exactly earth shattering stuff but it caught my eye nevertheless. Zeldman, suggests that it is probably a mistake to use 5 star ratings on websites or indeed any other option which allows a neutral answer. The problem is that if you allow people to rate something between 1 and 5 they will often rate it as a 3 because 3 is the most neutral response.

As Zeldman points out this problem is a lot broader than just 5 star ratings. It also applies to any response that allows for people to be uncommitted. Given a choice people will normally take a neutral stance.

As I said, this wasn’t an earth shattering post. But, what it did drive home is that web design is as much about understanding your users psychology as it is about good design or clean code.

IE Net render

I came across a site this week called IE Net Render that takes free instant screengrabs of your site displayed on IE 7, 6 or 5.5. This is a great way to see how your site is rendering on IE 6 or 5.5 once you have upgraded to 7. Its also damn useful if you are a mac or Linux user.

Of course, there are similar services out there but most of them charge and those that don’t are incredibly slow. What impressed me about IE Net Render was the speed with which it returned results. The only draw back is that it does not return content below its artificial fold.

Paul’s corner: Design testing

Headscape has always used design testing as part of its development process and yet we seem to be in the minority. We are often met with a lot of skepticism about the benefits of putting a design concept in front of real users as well as questions about how the process works. As I have received two emails on the subject over the last week I thought it was about time I explained the idea properly.

I have blogged about design testing. How we do it and why we think it works?

Marcus’ bit: Growing a web design buisness

Got this question from Andrew:

Last year I started my web design business from a back bedroom with very little experience and an old copy of Dreamweaver! I’m pleased to say I’m still here and the business is growing steadily. Your forum and podcasts have been invaluable and offered loads of great advice and support and no doubt helped many others in my position so thank you!
My question for you both is have you any advice on managing the growth and development of a web design business? As a one man band, when is a good time to take someone on, or could I realistically work with freelancers all the time? It seems that to take someone on is very costly (not just in terms of skills) but if I want to expand the business and our services for clients I can’t do it alone. Should I hire someone who can do everything, or someone who can sell leaving me to do design and development work? What are the pitfalls that I should look out for?

Any thoughts or insight into your experiences would be really helpful.

Interesting question, and one we have a lot of experience of but… one I feel I need to add a caveat to. What I am about to say is my personal opinion and does not constitute legal advice!

Ok, the easy bit first:

Sales people

Bless ‘em… we had enough bad experiences of sales people during our tenure at our previous company to know that the only people who reliably sell the services of a web design company are the people that own it.

I’m not saying there aren’t any good sales people out there, just that selling quite highly priced solution based work does not fit well with the standard sales ethos. Sales people like products. They like products with set prices (that they can cut). They like having demonstrable ROI.

Design, in particular, is very hard to put figures to. I can’t tell a company that redesigning their site will boost sales by X or Y percentage. I can talk about brand values and the importance of conveying quality online but I can’t put hard figures to it.

Most web design sales involve responding to a tender with a lengthy proposal and subsequent pitch that is tailored for that particular prospective client. It usually draws from all aspects of the business – design, technical, consultancy – and therefore needs someone with a good understanding of the business to put it together. I.e. the company owner/director.

Who to employ

Headscape currently includes the following general production roles:

  • Designer
  • Developer
  • Project manager
  • Information architect
  • Testing facilitator

Again, the directors tend to share IA and testing with the project managers. Project managers are invaluable members of any team but if you are looking to employ your first member of staff you need to get a designer or developer on board first.

Look at your own skills and see where you’re lacking. Maybe filling the gaps is the right way forward. However, that may only be appropriate if you’re looking to take on more complex work and simply doubling up on what you already have may be the most prudent move. Often, a new project win will point towards who the right person is.

When we started we had Paul doing design and some technical work, Chris doing project management and me doing sales. At the time, we had a great client that kept firing Flash work at us. We outsourced a couple of times but eventually ended offering a permanent position to one of these guys (he is still with us, as is the other guy who we outsourced to then!).
You mentioned hiring someone who can do everything – Chris, who was the first guy to join us, is a bit of a jack-of-all-trades so was perfect for us at the time. As we have grown though, we have looked for more and more specialist people.

Permanent or freelancer

Taking on freelancers can often mean the difference between being able to deliver a job or not. However, they are expensive and will badly erode your bottom line if you do it all the time. So, ask yourself – if I had an employee instead of a freelancer over the past X months, how much would I have saved?

Employees are a responsibility though and need looking after . One thing we have learned over the years is that happy staff make for more productive and more effective staff. As we have mentioned recently, Headscape has started encouraging everyone to spend a few hours each Friday afternoon working on anything they like. We get together monthly to present our ideas to each other – best idea wins something cool.

But sometimes you have to have to be prepared to make some very tough decisions. The bottom line is that the company always comes first. One final point though – and in the words of the late, great Douglas Adams – don’t panic! It is very easy to see things as much worse than they actually are.

Ask the expert: Mark Buckingham on SEO

This week we have Mark Buckingham on the show from netseek.co.uk to introduce us to the world of search engine optimization.

Mark helps dispels some myths surround SEO. He discusses best practice and talks about specific techniques such as keyword density and link popularity.

To be honest I felt like we only just scratched the surface of the subject of search engine optimization and would be keen to speak with Mark again. Its such a massive area that it is hard to know where to begin. So, if you have any specific questions you would like answered on SEO then drop me a line at [email protected] and I will get Mark back on soon.

Book recommendations

Finally, I just wanted to let you know that I have finally sorted my act out in regards to my reading list. One of the most common emails I receive asks me if I can recommend a book or what I am currently reading.

Now, I posted a list of recommended books ages ago but I never got around to updating it. Well I have finally done so and also gone a step further by creating an RSS feed of any books I read (be warned these will not all be web design related).

I promise to keep both the post and RSS feed up to date from now on!

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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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.

Podcast 61: Christmas Special

Posted in Classic shows on by Paul Boag

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

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Podcast: Download (24.1MB)

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

Download this show.

To subscribe directly within itunes click here

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

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

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

Special offers to boagworld listeners

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

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

News

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

Biggest Tech Mistakes of 2006

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

Best web applications of 2006

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

Dear Santa

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

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

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

Return on Investment

Posted in Web strategy on by Paul Boag

Recently a listener of my podcast wrote to me complaining that a recent screencast I did on the business benefits of web standards, didn’t work under Linux because it used Flash 8. This raised an interesting question. Do I care?

You see my problem is that I am obsessed with return on investment at the moment. It’s my pet subject and I find myself examining everything within this context. If a web design decision cannot demonstrate a business benefit then it probably isn’t worth doing. So, when I received the email mentioning the problem in Linux I couldn’t help wondering whether it was a problem worth fixing.

My logic went something like this:

I used an automated tool called Camtasia to produce the screencast and that generated the flash file for me. Other than the time involved in preparing and recording the screencast very little investment was spent.

The resulting screencast has proved extremely popular hitting the front page of digg.com and increasing my own exposure and that of my web design agency. In short it was a useful marketing tool, as well as a good way to promote the benefits of web standards. Win, win.

Because accessibility is important to me and because I wanted the presentation to be available to as many people as possible I produced it in four formats:

  • Flash Video
  • Audio Only
  • PowerPoint
  • PDF

Now admittedly it could do with an HTML version and I am working on that. However, generally speaking I thought I had made the effort.

So when I received the request for a Flash 7 version compatible with Linux, I had to consider if the additional work was justified. Unfortunately I had a problem.

I couldn’t find a quick automated method of producing the screencasts in Flash 7 format. Sure it could be done, but was the additional work justified from a business perspective.

If the presentation was a marketing tool then I had to ask myself whether building a Linux version would expose my presentation to anymore of my target audience. Well, obviously the people that buy my services aren’t other web designers but rather website owners. Do that many website owners really access websites from the Linux platform? My feeling was that the additional work wouldn’t generate sufficient additional leads to make it worth the while.

Of course, I had to consider secondary factors too. Would the absence of a Linux version adversely affect how people perceived my work? Possibly. Would it affect how I was perceived by potential clients? Probably not.

In the end I decided not to rework the screencast to support Flash 7.

You have probably guessed by now that I am exaggerating to make a point. Before we add new functionality to our sites we need to ask ourselves; will it pay for itself?

Obviously, the stuff I produce on this site is more than a marketing tool to me (although it does fulfil that role too). However, the point remains.

So what do you think? Did I make the wrong decision in not supporting Linux users? Does a moral obligation outweigh business considerations?

Podcast 29: The great flash debate

Posted in Classic shows on by Paul Boag

Flash is one of those web technologies that always generate a lot of debate. In this episode of boagworld.com Marcus and Paul go head to head arguing the pros and cons of this controversial plug-in.

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Podcast: Download (21.1MB)

Download this show.

Marcus and I have never really agreed when it comes to flash. Marcus is easily seduced by anything that animates or "shows off" in someway. I on the other hand take a much more balanced view, believing that flash is the spawn of the devil adding nothing to the web but accessibility and usability problems (hell its my blog, I can be completely bias if I want!). So with that in mind we decide to fight it out in the great flash debate:

The case in favour of flash

To be frank Marcus’ argument was appallingly weak and I can barely bring myself to repeat it in these notes. However, in the interests of fairness here is the crux of his argument.

  • Macromedia claim that Flash is available on well over 90% of the world’s computers.
  • That unlike HTML, CSS and even to some degree JavaScript, Flash renders fairly consistently across all browsers. This makes it a dependable and consistent development environment.
  • There are something’s that Flash just does better or that are simply impossible using other technologies.
  • That flash is the ultimate attention grabber with flash sites being far more visually engaging than HTML sites.
  • Flash advertising has a 5 times higher click through rate than HTML adverts. This demonstrates that people respond to it better.
  • With the number of people on broadband continuing to rise there is an ever greater demand for rich media content which utilises the increased bandwidth.

The case against flash

Although I was forced to grudgingly agree with some of Marcus’ points I wasn’t willing to give up without a fight. My valiant response went something like this:

  • Despite Macromedia’s outrageous claims about availability, ultimately Flash is a plug-in and so not everybody has it.
  • Search engines find it hard to spider flash files and so can have an adverse effect on your sites ranking.
  • Flash encourages poor practices including (but not limited to):
    • Mystery meat navigation
    • Annoying animation and sound
    • The "its art damn it" argument against making the things usable
    • A failure to test across different operating systems and browsers
    • As well as being hard to spider for search engines, flash also creates all kinds of accessibility problems for speech browsers.
    • By default flash breaks the back button in your browser
    • By default flash breaks bookmarking of specific parts of your flash application.
    • It is a closed format (no view source) preventing the cross fertilisation of techniques and ideas.
    • It doesn’t print well using the default browser print functionality.
    • Flash is often bandwidth intensive so penalising dial up users.
    • A lot of corporate environments actively block flash.
    • Flash is also often reliant on JavaScript creating even more accessibility problems.

I could have gone on. For example I could have mentioned IE’s latest problems supporting flash. But I guess I had made my point :)

The happy middle ground

Although we had a lot of fun arguing our corners, the reality is far less black and white. Like all technologies Flash can be used for good or evil. It is how you use it that matters not the technology itself. Flash is great for complex applications like mapping or horrendously long forms. It’s incredible at communicating complex ideas through audio, video or animation but even in these situations it can be used badly. Unless you know exactly the audience and user platform (like for some corporate intranets) you should always offer a more accessible alternative. You should avoid making entire sites in flash and using it too heavily for navigation which can not only cause accessibility problems but also search engine ranking issues.

Have your say

So what do you think? If you had your way would you ban flash from the web. Or do you believe that flash is the next natural evolution and we can all throw our HTML books away. Let’s see if we can’t start a flame war in the comments ;)

Molly Holzschlag : Web Essentials 05

Posted in Reviews on by Paul Boag

I have just finished listening to Molly Holzschlag’s keynote speech at the Web Essentials conference in Sydney. As usual, Molly had some fascinating insights into the changing world of web development, but something about her presentation just did not sit right with me.

Specialists working together

Molly primarily focused on the increasing number of fields within web design. As web development becomes more complex, so the need for specialists in different fields becomes more important. From usability and accessibility consultants to designers and developers, the range of specialists continues to grow. Molly went on to say that these specialists are increasingly working together to develop more complex web applications.

So what’s my problem!

So why did this not sit right with me? I certainly agreed with everything Molly said and she is definitely more knowledgeable than I am about the latest developments in web design. I think what I felt uncomfortable with was that Molly spoke as if this collaboration of web design specialists was the norm within the industry. In my experience, the web development world Molly was describing only exists within the high end of web design. I got the impression Molly believed that the majority of web designers specialised in different fields and worked in teams to develop sites. Although she did acknowledge this was not the case throughout the industry, I think she had a slightly unrealistic view about what was the norm.

There are still many all rounders

I work with fairly big clients including government bodies and various higher educational institutions. However, even within organisations of this size their web teams are limited. In most cases, they consisted of web editors and web developers/designers. Largely speaking individuals in web teams still have to be general "all rounders" and do not get the luxury of specialising in specific fields such as accessibility or usability. The majority of people still need to be "jacks of all trades" to some extent.

Now obviously the clients I work with are not comparable with those who engage Molly. However, I did get the feeling that Molly was describing a web design world that is still beyond the majority of my clients and certainly beyond the reach of the majority.

The need for trailblazers

Of course, it is important to remember that Molly and her peers are trailblazers in the industry, which are vital to our continued growth. However, I do have some concern that the gap between these trailblazers and those who follow might become too big for us to bridge. It is important that there are individuals who can bridge that gap and bring these working practices at the forefront of web design to the rest of the industry.

No real conclusion

I am not sure what my point is here and I have no nice conclusion to wrap up with. This is certainly not meant as a criticism of Molly or her peers. I guess it is merely me expressing a concern that for most of us, the world Molly describes is not yet here.

If you have had time to listen to Molly’s keynote I would be interested to hear your thoughts on it. Does your organisation have specialists or are your web developers "jacks of all trades"?

Are we in danger of over engineering?

Posted in Development on by Paul Boag

Web standards, CSS, XHTML, Microformats, WAI, semantic code, code validation, XML, eGIF, DOM, AJAX… is it just me or is web design getting a lot more complicated these days? Admittedly all of the above are very exciting developments and crucial for the future evolution of the web but I have to ask myself, are we in danger of over engineering things?

Web design is like car design

Cars can come with lots of cool stuff these days. From anti lock breaks, GPS, and power steering, to iPod player, on board computer and air bags. However, you don’t find all of these features in every car. Why not? The answer is obvious, they all cost money. Sure, if you are building a luxury top of the range Audi then you might include all these features. On the other hand, many people just want a car to get them from A to B and do not care about these kinds of bells and whistles. I believe the same is true for web design.

The Wild West of web design

There is a lot of talk about web design coming of age. We are moving past those Wild West days of web design where men were men and web sites were built by a bunch of cowboys. Now we are all grown up and behaving like responsible software engineers. However, like a spotty teenage boy growing his first sad excuse of a moustache, we are trying too hard. We seem to be under the impression that we have to cram all of these new features into every web site we build irrespective of whether it is appropriate or not.

Understand your audience. Understand your constraints

My wife is an engineer and it was her that first pointed out this danger of over engineering when I was telling her about all the latest web developments (admittedly I had to poke her a few times to keep her awake). She said that the golden rules of design are to understand your audience and understand your constraints.

Understanding your audience

I know this is heresy, but if less than 1% of your users are viewing your site on a Mac, is it necessary to test the site on that platform. Equally, if you are designing a site for a paintball company is it necessary to make that site accessible for blind people. Admittedly, a blind person could be booking paintballing for a friend who does not have a disability that would exclude them from the activity, but how likely is that really and is it worth the extra expense of testing for it?

Understand your constraints

In many cases, this comes down to money. Testing on multiple browsers and complying with various standards takes time and time in most cases costs money. Often clients come to us with a set budget and they want the most they can get for that money. It is up to me to make sure they get the biggest return on investment. If its a choice between making sure the site works with JavaScript disabled or giving them a user tested ecommerce system I will probably choose the latter.

My concerns

Many designers in the past have been more concerned with making nice pieces of "art" for their portfolio rather than producing a design that works well for the client and his users. In these more enlightened days of user centric design, we do not take that approach. However, it is probably true to say that we do in our code. Are we more concerned with adding those little links in the footers of our sites telling our peers that this site validates or that it uses web standards and is accessible than we are making sure our clients get the best return.

Design 101: Colour

Posted in Design on by Paul Boag

In the first of my series on the basics of good web design I tackled how to handle branding. In this article I want to deal with the more subjective issue of colour. How do you choose the right colour palette?

A subjective decision

The biggest problem with choosing the right colour palette is that it is all down to individual taste. Colour is a matter of opinion and there is no right or wrong answer. As a result you will get as many opinions on your colour palette as people you ask.

Differences in colour

Part of the problem is that we all perceive colour in slightly different ways. Also roughly 1 in 20 people have some form of colour vision deficiency.

However that is just the beginning. In addition to the differences that exist between people in the way we perceive colour, there is also differences in the way our computers show colour.

There are a whole range of factors which affect the way our computers display colour. These include:

  • Monitor type
  • Monitor brightness and contrast settings
  • Graphics card used
  • Operating system being used
  • Colour depth
  • Gamma settings

Colour theory

Because the choice of colour is so subjective and because you cannot guarantee exactly how a colour is going to be finally displayed to the end user it is important to remove the choice of palette from the realms of personal opinion. One way to do this is to use colour theory.

A lot of research has been done in how users respond to colour and what emotional connections they make. We all know the basics like red means danger or blue is cold. However this area of research has gone much further.

An excellent book on the subject is Shigenobu Kobayashi’s book Color Image Scale. This book provides over 1000 colour palettes organised by mood, taste and lifestyle. What this book allows you to do is look up a concept such as "Urban" and find an appropriate colour palette.

I know that many people are skeptical of books like this but I believe they have real value. Kobayashi’s book was based on research done over 3 years involving analysing responses to colour from a large sample audience. Surely this is preferable to a few individuals debating the subject based on personal preference.

Corporate colours

Of course in many situations you don’t have the luxury of starting with a blank palette. Often you will be required to work with an existing corporate colour such as IBM blue. In these cases it is a matter of finding complimentary colours that work well with your corporate colour.

Again, in order to avoid descending into the world of personal opinion, I prefer to use colour theory as a base on which to build.

Fortunately there are some excellent tools out there that will help you build a palette based on a single corporate colour.

Some sites worth experimenting with are:

Color Match 5KColor scheme generator 2

However by far my favourite is a piece of software called Color Schemer Studio. This brilliant tool allows you to create a variety of colour palettes based on long standing colour theory principles. It also exports them in a variety of formats and provides RGB and HEX values. It even helps you ensure high contrast for the best web site readability.

Conclusions

This article just scratches the surface of an enormous subject but hopefully it provides a few useful tips to get you started on creating effective colour palettes while avoiding the squabbles of personal preference. In my next article in the Design 101 series we will look at structure and layout.

Financial benefits of usability

Posted in User experience on by Paul Boag

In this article I outline exactly why usability testing is worth the effort and how it can translate into real financial gain.

A large part of my job is improving web site usability. However, convincing companies to spend time and money on usability testing is always an uphill battle. Somehow it is seen as a luxury that can be left out. This couldn’t be further from the truth! Below I outline exactly why usability testing is worth the effort and how it can translate into real financial gain.

Reducing Customer Support

Answering customer queries, taking orders and handling complaints can prove an expensive and resource hungry job. But a well designed, usable web site can significantly reduce this burden. If your web site makes it easy to order online, get questions answered and resolve problems then your users won’t need to phone, fax or email you. This means you can reduce the number of man hours dedicated to customer support and so make significant financial savings.

Design is a matter of opinion

It is amazing how many web development projects stall over disagreements based on personal opinion. Disagreements over colour schemes, the benefits or drawbacks of dropdown menus, the amount of marketing information that can be collected from a website before you begin to put people off. These are the kind of issues that can prevent a site progressing in its development. Everybody seems to have an opinion and everybody thinks they are right. By presenting these issues to a sample of your target audience you can get a truly independent point of view. This often cuts days or even weeks off development time allowing you to become the first to market.

Increased customer satisfaction

We all know that customer satisfaction leads to customer loyalty and that customer loyalty leads to repeat sales. This is especially true on the web where your competition is only a click away. When it is so easy to go elsewhere customers become very fickle and the tiniest thing can make them give up on you and visit your competition. However a site that has been tested with real users, and therefore meets their needs, can give you an edge over your competition. It will ensure your customers to stay with you while encouraging your competition’s customers to make the switch.

Decreased need to publish after-the-fact fixes

Hindsight is a great thing. Once your web site is live and real users are interacting with it on a daily basis it often becomes obvious where the flaws are in your site. However, changes at this late stage can often be too late and expensive. If users find your site difficult to use on their first visit they are extremely unlikely to ever come back again. It is therefore vital that any problems are resolved BEFORE the web site goes live.

Decrease in abandoned shopping baskets

Something like 70% of shopping baskets are abandoned on the web! This equates to millions of pounds of lost revenue. People abandon shopping baskets for lots of different reasons some of which are beyond your control to prevent. However the vast majority are abandoned because the user becomes frustrated with the shopping process. Usability testing can help identify these points of frustration early and help remove them from the shopping flow.

Early identification of problems

Effective usability testing isn’t just something that is carried out at the end of a project. By that point it is almost too late to make changes and correct problems. Usability testing should be an integrated part of the development process happening continually as the site is developed. This enables you to identify problems early and avoid having to make expensive and complex adaptation later in the site’s life. By catching problems early it is possible to correct problems before they have too great an impact to correct .

Removal of unnecessary features

It is often surprising what usability testing turns up. It is not unusual for it to actually demonstrate that your web site is over-engineered. Sometimes you discover that actually your site is too small to bother about a search function or that your target audience isn’t interested in some of the applications you are offering. By carrying out testing you discover this early on in the sites development and can drop these components before time and money is invested in building them.