Web Developer 2.0

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Simple and intuitive? ...not really.
2007-03-19 17:11:00
I'm going to start this post by apologising in advance to the creators of the two products that I'm using as examples. There is absolutely nothing wrong with them as far as I know and I'm only using them because they displayed screenshots that illustrate my point.Looking at content management systems, I've noticed that so-called "simple and intuitive interfaces" are usually anything but simple and more often than not lacking in the intuitivity department.I think the problem stems from the fact that content management seems at face value to be a relatively simple concept. A system to store chunks of text or html and files such as images or other downloadables. An interface to allow a user to login and then edit or add to those stored items and a display system to output the content on request - Easy!...or not so, if you've ever tried to build or even configure a CMS, you'll be aware of how much complexity the freeform nature of content management cre...
More About: Simp , Real , Simple , Intuit , Really

Million Dollar Avatar
2007-03-14 20:55:00
I've been featured on the homepage of this site nearly every day for the past week so it's only fair that I give it a fair plug.Million Doll ar Avatar is an application built by Kevin Fricovsky. He says:I created Million Dollar Avatar(MDA) over the course of 3.5 weeks, starting the week my in-laws showed up to stay in my guestroom (not a bad reason to lock yourself in your office at night - jk ;). I'm also very lucky to have a pregnant wife who just so happens to fall asleep around 8pm every night. So I took the opportunity to build out one of my many ideas and created this site during my free time at night and on a few weekends.The site is kind of a cross between the million dollar homepage idea and a blog community / traffic generator along the lines of Mybloglog. It's a very competent application although I do feel that the community building aspects could be brought to the fore a little more.The homepage wall of avatars is a great way for people to test the appeal o...
More About: Lion

Web Developer 2.1?
2007-03-14 00:43:00
This is the new design for this site, I hope you don't find it too disturbing.I used the addition of the T-shirt store as an excuse to update the site design. The previous layout was the first fixed-width layout that I'd built since about 1999 and I only did it out of laziness. Ever since I've fely dirty and ashamed for creating all that unused browser width so it's back to good old fluid layouts again.There will be a period of adjustment whilst I tidy up the content and tweak the design somewhat (such as add in an IE6 stylesheet) The site homepage will be used as a dashboard into various things including a new idea that I'm also working on (very secret, I may have already said too much).Please let me know if you find anything broken or hanging off the site at an unusual angle.
More About: Developer , Web developer , Develop

Future of Web Design 07
2007-03-12 14:47:00
I've just confirmed that I'll be attending the Future of Web Desi gn conference on April 18th. I'm looking forward to a good selection of speakers and hooking up with like minded individuals.Give me a shout if you're also going and want to meet up for a chinwag.
More About: Sign

Release the Spiders!
2007-03-09 16:31:00
An age-old tenet of web design is that stickiness can be created by delighting your user. In other words, little things that the user finds enjoyable or entertaining creates an association in the user's mind between a nice experience and your website or application.An example of this that keeps popping into my head is the submit button for the Blog claim form on Technorati."Release the Spider s!" is great, using the standard "Submit" would have been just as usable but in this case the wording is slightly more informative and raises a smile - creating that positive association.The only downside I can see is that users looking for a traditional "Submit" button may not understand that this is the one that they need to click. Perhaps "Submit and Release the Spiders!" would be better but not quite as funny - especially when said in a Monty Burns voice.
More About: Pide , Lease , Ease

Video sharing sites, so much choice.
2007-03-09 12:23:00
I just thought I'd drop this pile of links in here. I've been researching the options for places to upload and share branded video content for a client. Here's the list that I've come up with in just over an hour:Beedeo Blinkx Blogcheese Brightcove Broadbandsports BubblePly Clicktv Clipshack ClipSyndicate Coull.tv Currenttv Cuts Dabble Dailymotion eefoof Evideoshare ExpoTV FameWave Flikzor Flurl GlanceTV GoFish Googlevideo Gotuit Graffiti Guba I Watch This Jumpcut Keepvid LiveLeak LiveVideo Lycos Mix Magnify Metacafe Moblr Mobunga Motionbox Myfilmz Openvlog Pawky Podesk Pooxi PureVideo ROO ScreenBites Sharkle StumbleVideo TIOTI Truveo UberChannel Uvouch Veoh VidaVee Viddler Videobomb VideoEgg Videosift Vimeo Vmix VodPod Vringo Vsocial Vurbs WeWin Yashi YouTube Ziddio ZippyvideosAs you can see, there's a wealth of options for publicising your video content. Have I missed any good ones from here?Update - I found some more here via Mashable:Blip.tv Break.com Lulu...
More About: Site , Sites , Ring , Choice

Web 2.0: What Is It Really?
2007-03-08 01:08:00
We're all looking for that magical web 2.0 definition that we can finally say "Yep, that's the one" but whilst it may never arrive we still see many attempts to write it. Here's one that I particularly like.Sean Carton writes:So what is Web 2 .0? Here are six elements that define the change in how we all think about and use the Web: Web 2.0 is about data abstraction. All those Web 2.0 functions people love to talk about, such as tagging, sharing, XML, open APIs (define), and mashups, only became possible because we now understand how to free information from containers. Though the Web credo "information wants to be free" has been around for a while, we've only recently been able to make it happen. Pulling information out of proprietary containers allows you to do pretty much whatever you want with it, whether driving collaborative sites, interfacing with mobile devices, or something else.Web 2.0 takes broadband and Moore's Law for granted. Site...
More About: What , Hat , Real , Really

Usability Review of Freshbooks.com
2007-03-05 14:54:00
This is old but I only recently discovered it. Jack Bellis has written this informative usability review of Freshbooks, an online invoicing tool that incorporates a host of other useful features. These include online timesheets and support issue tracking.I've passed this review on to our designers because it not only highlights a really well designed application but points out specific things and explains why they are good. This is far more useful than doing the usual manager thing of saying "look at this website and make it work like that".Jack's detailed explantions give food for thought in designing any part of an application interface, not just elements which are similar in functionality to those found in Freshbooks. I recommend reading the review and then setting up a trial account with Freshbooks just so that you can appreciate the level of thought and detail that has gone into the interface design.Freshbooks have just announced that they've added Basecam...
More About: Books , Review , Book , Usability , View

Web 2.0 Business Models
2007-03-01 23:15:00
Generation C (The C stands for Content) is now a near-essential part of any ?web 2.0? ? type business model. This from Trendwatching: "The GENERATION C phenomenon captures the an avalanche of consumer generated ?content? that is building on the Web, adding tera-peta bytes of new text, images, audio and video on an ongoing basis."How are web-savvy companies taking advantage of this pool of talented content creators?When you look at the business models of YouTube and Flickr to take two well known examples. They provide a framework that allows anybody and everybody to add content to the collection as a whole. Revenue is generated through selling advertising on the sites. The clever part of the model is that Flickr and Youtube do not require payment in order to add content, this is the incentive to get people using the sites.The next step in the evolution of this type of business model is that the Gen-C content providers are getting more professional in their efforts and feel ...
More About: Business , Models , Web 2 , Model , Ness

New Shirt Design
2007-03-01 10:59:00
Just a quick post to let you know that I've added a new design to the T-shirt store.This one is limited to only a few garments and colors because the design only works on a coloured background.Hurry and order your iBlog shirt before Apple decide to slap a cease and desist letter on me.
More About: Design , Desi , Shirt , Sign

Internerd apparel
2007-02-27 13:07:00
For a long time now, I've been plagued with ideas for T-shirts that I'd love to own but inexplicably didn't exist. I know as well as anybody that this is a sorry state of affairs for anybody who's used the internet for any length of time due to the number of good print-on-demand merchandising companies that allow you to set up your own store.Probably the most well-known and quite possibly biggest of these is CafePress, the only downside (from my point of view) is that they are based in the states. I've also checked out Spreadshirt, who also run a European site and Simply Icons who are UK based.So getting back to the point, I decided to resurrect my old CafePress account and start putting some work into turning the designs in my head into real objects.The early result is at www.cafepress.com/webdev2. I'm going to update the site design so that I have proper navigation between this blog and the store pages. I intend to regularly add new shirt designs to the sto...
More About: Nerd , Inter , Apparel , Intern , Appa

Accessible Ajax
2007-02-15 14:03:00
I was going to write a detailed post about how to incorporate ajax functionality in a way that allows the page to degrade gracefully for downscale browsers. Then I sawPeter Quinsey's article "User-Proofing Ajax " on A List Apart which not only covers the same ground but adds an excellent extra element.The basic idea is to construct a page that works without any javascript requirements, using hyperlinks and forms to pass data between the client and the server. You then use JavaScript to intercept those links and form submissions and pass the information via your Ajax code instead. In this way the page will still work fine for users who, for whatever reason, do not have javascript enabled. Jeremy Keith of Clearleft appears to have coined a term for this: "Hijaxing" - essentially Hijacking the normal click events and replacing them with Ajax calls.The final section of Quinsey's article addresses a major usability issue in Ajax functionality which is silent er...
More About: Access

Long time, no post
2007-02-14 15:21:00
I've been mega-busy for the last couple of weeks to the point that I didn't want to sit at a computer any more than I needed to. I have the next couple of days off though so I'll finish off some of the draft posts that I've been jotting down and post them.
More About: Time , Post , Long

Wikipedia now no-go for SEO
2007-01-28 01:57:00
I'm surprised I missed it, but Last week Wiki pedia updated all of it's external links to use the 'nofollow' microformat. This essentially means that any link from Wikipedia to a website now has zero effect on the search engine ranking of that site.This is a big blow to SEO link builders, as one of the top authority sites on the web (Google Pagerank 8) Wikipedia has been a great source for quality inbound links as long as the "Wikipolicia" think that your link is valid for whichever page you have added it.Personally I think it's a good move on Wikipedia's part. That site's open format makes it a relatively soft target to spammers. It's testament to the work put in by dedicated Wikipedians that the site hasn't descended into spam chaos. I wouldn't be surprised to see more of the big UGC sites such as Digg following suit.One of the sites that I manage contains an anonymous forum type of area which has been attacked by spammers in the pa...
More About: Pedi

Hot for 2007 - User Engagement
2007-01-21 23:05:00
I attended a seminar a few evenings ago given by Ian Jindal of InternetRetailing.net. The topic was "Hot Topics for 2007". Given Ian's background in online retail, the content was very much focused on the e-commerce sector. I don't have much to do with e-commerce at the moment so it was refreshing to see what was going on with comparison shopping sites and problems faced by some of the major e-commerce players.One thing that Ian brought up was that "User Engage ment" would be of paramount concern over the next year. This would appear to be a combination of what I would call user experience and good client management. Providing an interface that people enjoy using and tracking their actions and choices in order to provide a trustworthy brand experience are the things that can make or break an online retailer.I was a little perturbed at the end of the seminar when Ian dismissed a question concerning usability and accessibility as "pretty much the same t...
More About: Men , Gage , Engagement

An SEO experiment success
2007-01-19 16:57:00
I recently tried out something a little different on a website that I maintain. The site has a large amount of dynamic content, generated by the site users. In order to get around the AJAX paging I needed to generate sitemaps but I only did this about once every 2 weeks. I decided to try out serving up a dynamic sitemap which generated the XML list of urls on demand.In addition to this I started generating the page description meta-tag from the content of the page, so every page had a unique description.The results were more than I expected, the number of visitors to the site increased by approximately 30% in 4 days.Here's a link to the more detailed description on my company blog.The next trick up my sleeve is to extract keywords from the content. The Keyword meta-tag is not particularly useful in SEO terms but I'll be updating the site's RSS feeds soon and some keyword tagging / categorisation could be a useful addition.
More About: Men , Experiment , Success , Peri , Rime

Slicing the global brain
2007-01-13 02:33:00
Apparently user-generated content is the new big thing. It seems to me that the web as a whole is one big UGC application. The main difference is that the likes of flickr, myspace, blogger etc. have lowered the bar for entry.Back in the mid nineties we were fiddling about with command line FTP over a 9600 kbps dial up connection to upload our hand-coded-in-notepad HTML . (to tell the truth I still code in notepad on a regular basis ? old habits die hard)Nowadays, anybody can find easy ways to publish their content on the web so the spread of subjects documented has expanded beyond the porn/tech/sci-fi early years of the web when people started moving over from BBS s and Usenet.The internet is becoming an increasingly accurate map of some sort of aggregate human psyche. This is happening thanks to the percentage of population who have access to the internet growing, and the developers of web content services and ubiquitous computing devices finding easier way for those people to add ...
More About: Rain , Global , Brain , Al B , The G

MyBlogLog goes from strength to strength
2007-01-09 14:49:00
A few days ago, it was officially announced that Yahoo had aquired MyBlog Log. This is great news for Eric and the team who have built a wonderful tool for creating communities around blog sites.I've been a member of MyBlogLog since June last year and to begin with I wasn't sure how much use it would be to me. Since adding the Recent Readers Widget to this site, I now find myself making connections with people that I otherwise wouldn't have done. Whenever I see a new face in the widget, I go and check out their sites to see if they are writing anything that interests me. As a result, I'm building a nice collection of communities that I can dip into for information and inspiration without trawling search engine results.There are some shameless, though not particularly underhanded, self promotion tactics being used to build communities around blogs on MyBlogLog. Using a picture of a hot girl as your avatar is one (increasingly common) way to get people checking out you ...
More About: Goes

Overheating problems
2006-06-18 19:21:00
I've been having a few problems with my PC this month, It's fairly old now and tends to overheat and shut down with prolonged use. The recent warmer weather has been causing me major problems though. On a hot day my machine struggles to stay functional for more than 20 minutes leaving me with a 6 year old laptop which is held together with duct tape. I've always hated the whole process of trying to work out a PC specification that gives me the best price/performance ratio. My current machine has been upgraded many times over the past few years (I'm not sure if any of the original components are still in there) so I'm in the mood to get an off-the-shelf model this time. If any PC manufacturers feel like sponsoring my blog (come on Alienware, you know you want to) then let me know otherwise it's time to start pouring over spec lists and offers.
More About: Heat , Problems , Problem , Over , Eating

4 essential points for building successful online communities
2006-06-11 19:20:00
Many new internet startups and websites rely on building communities, many fail for various reasons but there are always lessons to be learned. I've been lucky enough to be put in charge of re-developing a site which already has an active community so I've spent some time trying to discern what makes or breaks an online community.Don't rely on community contributions.One of the major problems encountered are sites which do not function without contributions from their users. A catch 22 situation arises when the site will not be used unless there is content and the content is not present unless anybody uses the site. It's important then to consider how the site can be a useful resource with AND without the community's contributions. Look at pulling in syndicated data from external sources or partnerships with other data providers to make up any shortfall and ensure that you site doesn't die from neglect.Motivate your usersMotivation to contribute is another pr...
More About: Building , Muni , Success , Online , Esse

Content structure tool
2006-06-06 18:00:00
Here's an idea for an application: I frequently have to analyse the content structure of existing websites as part of an exercise to re-structure and improve the site. What I could do with is a site crawler that could take a good guess at the content structure based on page titles, navigational elements, folder structures, sitemaps etc. and output a nicely formatted organigram of the site structure. The ability to output the structure as OPML or some other XML format would be useful too. Does anybody know if such a thing exists or is anybody interested in developing it?
More About: Tool , Content , Structure , Tent

Usability vs. Accessibility, which should win?
2006-04-21 18:01:00
Every website / web application should conform to accessibility standards and adhere to good usability practices, right?Wrong. Though it?s an admirable target to aim for, achieving accessibility standards compliance with optimal usability is not always viable. The two don?t always play nicely together. Sure enough, well-formed, semantic HTML output and well though out content structure will do most of the work for you in hitting the twin targets of accessibility and usability but occasionally there is a see-saw effect. If you want to use rich interactive elements to enhance the user experience and improve the potential usability of your design, you may find that you are also making the design less accessible. What are the questions that we should ask ourselves when planning a new feature for a website or web application? The following are some of mine. "Will it impact accessibility?" We need to determine if our new feature will have a negative impact on the accessibility o...
More About: Usability , Access , Should , Bili , Accessibility

Defining Web 2.0
2006-03-20 17:59:00
In this post, the sentence "Web 2 .0 is hard to define but for me it is about collaboration and organising information more easily." prompted me to think about how I defined web 2.0. It's a much discussed concept that may never get a definition that everybody can agree on.My (current) idea of web 2.0 is that there is move towards open sharing of data in such a way that it can be used in ways other than simply as a web page. Through the use of RSS and semantic XHTML, published information can be shaped and reused outside of the traditional browser environment.Thanks to the maturation of technologies such as CSS and XML and a seemingly more vigourous campaign for accessibility and usability on the web, we are finally starting to use what has been a target for so long - The concept of Author-once, present-many times. With good CSS2 support (apart from in IE, and yes I know this site still looks crappy in IE) we can author a page and then apply a stylesheet that will tailor...
More About: Web 2.0