Which Simpsons character best represents the Drupal community?
In preparation for the Bringing it All Back Home: CMS Communities panel at SXSW, which I'll be speaking at on Saturday, I posed the following question on Twitter and in #drupal:
Which Simpsons character best represents the #Drupal community and why?
And the winner, in terms of number of responses, was...
- Thinks she has all the answers to save the world but is so pathetically naive she never will. Yet you love her anyway. - TheRealCrell
- Underestimated, Intelligent, resourceful. With a wonderful singing voice. - bear_feet
- She is open minded and usually diplomatic :) - JCL324
- Logical, but not so popular. - DaftNinja
And here were the others. Feel free to comment too with your own. :)
read more »Drupal Voices 78: Wolfgang Ziegler on the Rules Module
Wolfgang Ziegler (aka "fago") talks about the Rules module, and how it can be used by non-programmers to set up a series of events that are executed after certain conditional triggers happen. Fago claims that this is a more robust solution that Drupal's core trigger module functionality.
The Rules module in Drupal 6 is an evolution from the Workflow-NG module in Drupal 5, but renamed to reflect that it can do much more than just workflow.
There was also a Summer of Code project by klausi that integrated into the Rules package as the Rules Forms module.
Fago also talks about the future of Rules and how he plans on improving the APIs so that it's more extensible to add in loops and new features, and to have Features module integration with rules so that it's possible to and re-use rules.
Google Buys Picnik
Google announced last week that they had aquired the web-based photo-editing app Picnik. Picnik started in 2005 and was one of first online photo-editing sites.
It’s a very busy site, with almost 40 million visitors each month. On the company blog, a clearly very excited staff member (and why wouldn’t they be?) said:
What does this mean for you Picnikers? Nothing is changing right away, but Picnik now has more potential than ever before. The team that built Picnik from the grass up will continue making advanced and powerful photo-editing easier, more intuitive and more fun, so stay tuned to hear about all the cool new stuff we’re working on.
Piknik lets users edit their photos online then post them to social networking sites such as Flickr, Facebook and Picassa. Users can avail of a basic service which is free, or the premium service which costs $24.95 per year. Google already owns Picassa so it looks like it’s positioning itself to be chief of the online photo world. Picnik’s competitors include Photoshop.com and Aviary who just recently made all of their online graphics apps available for free.
On Google’s blog, Brian Axe, Product Management Director said
We’re not announcing any significant changes to Picnik today, though we’ll be working hard on integration and new features. As well, we’d like to continue supporting all existing Picnik partners so that users will continue to be able to add their photos from other photo sharing sites, make edits in the cloud and then save and share to all relevant networks.
So no changes to speak of yet, but it will be interesting to see what comes down the line. Picnik was bought for an undisclosed sum.
Are you a Picnik user? Any thoughts on Google’s new acquisition?
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Is Opera 10.5 the Best Browser Ever?
Opera has one of the most rapid browser release schedules and 10.5 is now available — just in time for Microsoft’s EU browser choice screen. You’ll need to download it from Opera.com, although automatic updates from previous versions will appear shortly.
Opera 10.5 is a significant update — other browser vendors would have bumped up the major version number. Here’s what you can expect:
- excellent W3C standards support
- a private browsing mode
- native widgets — independent applications which continue to work when the browser isn’t running
- a new interface
- a new JavaScript and graphics engine — Opera claim it’s the fastest browser on Earth.
These last two aspects are the biggest changes…
Stunning SurfingOpera’s always been one of the better-looking browsers, but Jon Hicks has made 10.5 look glorious. The most noticeable change is the Chrome-like removal of the title bar and menu.
The red ‘O’ icon can be clicked to access the most frequently-used options and show the menu bar if you want it.
The whole interface can be configured to your taste. Icons can be added and removed, panels can be re-arranged, and even the window color can be changed.
It’s also the first non-Microsoft browser to offer a fully-integrated Windows 7/Vista experience with Aero, jumplists and taskbar tab support. It’s a welcome addition and many users will appreciate the productivity benefits.
Finally, Opera has removed the irritating modal dialog boxes and replaced them with page overlays or panels. “Find in Page” is the best I’ve seen — it dims the page content and highlights all instances of the word. I expect competing browsers will replicate that feature soon.
Although it has a reputation for speed, Google Chrome appeared to overtake Opera during the past year.
Opera is making bold claims about their new Carakan JavaScript engine. I tested it using the SunSpider benchmark and Opera came out top. It was only 1% faster than Chrome, but more than twice as fast as Firefox 3.6. JavaScript benchmarks don’t tell the whole story and your experience could be different, but the engine is certainly one of the quickest.
Every vendor claims their browser is the fastest — even Microsoft — and “proof” can be offered with tests that exploit known optimizations. However, one of the best independent reviews of the top five browsers is available at Tom’s Hardware. In summary:
- Opera and Chrome come out top, but Chrome just edges ahead with more second places.
- Opera is especially fast when handling plugins such as Flash, Silverlight and Java. YouTube pages load are almost twice as fast as Firefox and three times faster than Chrome.
- Opera’s memory usage is higher for a single tab, although the differences reduce as more tabs are opened.
Forget the charts, though. Browser margins in most of the tests are measured in milliseconds and the differences will be imperceivable. What matters is how fast the browser feels to you on your machine. In my experience, Opera is more than a match for Chrome and it offers far more features.
Is Opera “the fastest browser on Earth”? I find no reason to dispute their claim.
Switch Straightaway?OK, so Opera’s fast. It looks fabulous. It has more features out of the box than any competitor. It offers great developer tools. Standards support is excellent and it’s usually the first to pass ACID tests. And almost every aspect of the browser can customized or configured.
Yet it’s not my default browser. Opera retains a tiny 2% market share which has barely changed during the past decade. Coming tomorrow: the problem with Opera…
Have you switched to Opera 10.5? What do you love about the browser? What do you dislike?
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Web Design News 09 /03/10
The web design news is brought to you by Webdesigner Depot. Webdesigner Depot is a popular web design blog covering tutorials, design trends, blogging and inspirational posts. You can visit WDD at webdesignerdepot.com and follow WDD on Twitter @designerdepot.
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Helping users when they are too busy to readAs is pointed out this week on 52weeksofux the days of reading help manuals are over. In a world of twitter, facebook, mobile phones and email we just don’t have the opportunity to spend long lengths of time learning a new system or website.
As the post suggests…
We don’t have two hours to read a help manual. We probably don’t even have 20 minutes. Instead, we learn a bit here and a slice there, all adding up to real learning but not in contiguous time.
In short we learn as we go along.
This should have a considerable impact on how we design our websites. We can no longer except users to consult a help section or contact you for advice when they cannot use your website. According to 52weeksofux we need to change our approach:
In its place is embedded support: directions, tips, cues, and other signposts that can nudge us back on track. One example of this type of inline hand-holding is microcopy: the small, useful copy that helps answer contextual questions and defray concerns.
So what about your site? Do you provide enough support to help users learn about your site as they go? Are your error messages and instructional text clear and descriptive? Perhaps it is time to revisit your website copy.
Critiquing designOne of the most controversial areas of the web design process is design sign off. Everybody (including clients) has strong opinions about what they like or dislike. Designers on the other hand are often overly sensitive about their work and so this can lead to a lot of friction.
Being able to give and receive criticism as well as discuss design in a constructive manner is a skill both designers and website owners require.
Fortunately an article on Smashing Magazine called “Web Design Criticism: A How-To” guides us through the process.
The article explores the subject of design critiques before suggesting 8 pieces of advice on how best to give feedback. It’s a valuable article and well worth reading.
In my opinion design critiques are extremely important, especially in teams of designers. It is always good to have another designer looking at your work and provide feedback. As a designer it is easy to become too close to your project. A fresh perspective is always valuable.
If you are a freelancer and don’t have anybody to discuss your designs with why not try the website critique section of the boagworld forum.
Talking of design, I am constantly amazed how many websites still go through regular redesigns that involve major overhauls of the look and feel.
I can understand designers desire to do something new and fresh. However, even website owners seem to want something new.
The problem is that although you might get a kick out of doing a major overhaul of your sites look and feel, users often do not respond so well.
In Gerry McGovern’s latest post he points to Facebook as an example of what can happen when you redesign:
“After a redesign in March, a Facebook poll revealed that 94 percent of users didn’t like the changes,” Caitlin McDevitt wrote for Slate in February 2010. “When Facebook introduced its News Feed in 2006, students organized to protest against it.”
In fact most users like familiarity and dislike change. This is because users do not want to be excited by a new design, they just want to get things done. Gerry goes on to say…
The vast majority of them are at your website to get something done as quickly as possible. The only people who are likely to complain about your website design are website designers. Craigslist is constantly being told that its site is boring. “But the people I hear it from,” Craigslist CEO Jim Buckmaster told Wired in 2009, “are invariably working for firms that want the job of redoing the site.”
Sites should evolve over time rather than go through sporadic redesign.
Does this mean our websites should never change. Absolutely not. However, we need to examine our motives for change and when we do change it should be an evolution not a revolution.
CSS typographyThere has been a lot of excitement recently about services such as Typekit and Fontdeck that allow designers the ability to use custom fonts on their websites.
However, custom fonts are only the beginning of what can be done with typography using CSS. Unfortunately it can be hard to keep up with all the latest innovations so it is good to see a post by Yaili about CSS typography.
The post on Smashing Magazine is a comprehensive overview of everything you can do with type using CSS. This includes:
- White space
- Word wrap
- Word and letter spacing
- Indentation and hanging punctuation
- Web fonts
- Text shadow
- And some new emerging text decoration
With all of these tools at our disposal it is looking like the days of Cufon, Flash replacement or image replacement are numbered.
The web design news is brought to you by Webdesigner Depot. Webdesigner Depot is a popular web design blog covering tutorials, design trends, blogging and inspirational posts. You can visit WDD at webdesignerdepot.com and follow WDD on Twitter @designerdepot.
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New Logo For Glasgow 2014 Commonwealth Games Unveiled
The new logo for the 2014 Commonwealth Games which will take place in Glasgow, was revealed today. The logo was designed by Glasgow-based design agency Marque and according to reports, is said to have cost £95,000. The design is based around numbers associated with the games. This is the 20th time the games have been held, there are 17 sports represented, and it takes place over 11 days of competition and 1 host city.
If you think it’s just a couple of partially completed rings wrapped around the letter G, here’s the full explanation from the press release on the Games website:
1. The Glasgow 2014 Commonwealth Games will be the 20th Games. This is a landmark number that adds to Glasgow’s pride in being its host. The outer ring, that encompasses the others, is a strong, vibrant red – the official “True Red” of the Commonwealth Games Federation (CGF) palette.
2. There will be 17 sports on the programme at Glasgow 2014. The next ring of the brand identity, in “Triumph Yellow” from the CGF palette, represents the number of sports. It’s exactly 17/20ths of the full circle.
3. Glasgow 2014 will host 11 days of competition, which are represented in the third ring of the brand identity, rendered in the CGF’s “Heritage blue”, and making up 11/20ths of the circle.
4. At the heart of our brand identity is 1 Host City, represented by “G” for Glasgow, meaning “Dear Green Place” in Gaelic, and is in a suitably vibrant green.
The Commonwealth Games Federation has also approved, for the first time, the use of an alternative Gaelic form of the design. The Gaelic version contains the type “Glaschu 2014”, followed by "20mh Geamaichean a’Cho Fhlaitheis" (20th Commonwealth Games).
Logo Design Love also has an analysis of the new logo, and you can see an animated version of the logo here, on the Scottish TV website.
Any thoughts on the logo? Do you think it’s a good design or the do you think it’s a type of design you’ve seen many times before?
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Job Post: Lullabot Seeks Experienced Project Manager
Lullabot is looking for an experienced project manager. Responsibilities include: managing scope, deliverables, schedules, and team resources for Lullabot client and internal projects. Daily tasks would include leading daily 15 minute check-in calls for each project, tending the ticket queue and managing task lists, communicating (email/phone) with clients, and basically keeping projects on track and moving forward. Lullabot is a distributed company without a central office, so like all Lullabot jobs, this is a telecommuting position and may involve travel.
Additional responsibilities include helping to write and assemble new project proposals and statements of work, though we tend to focus on bigger projects and don't take on too many projects at once. You'd be responsible for estimating and staffing projects, meeting with clients, pursuing and growing development partnerships, and coordinating the delivery of various projects.
If this sounds like a lot, it is. But Lullabot is a very collaborative company so you won't be working in isolation. You'll be working with a team of highly experienced Drupal consultants and developers with excellent communication skills and a passion for their work.
Ideal candidates should:
- have 2 years or more of experience managing large web projects
- be generally familiar with the Drupal platform
- be a great communicator with good writing skills
- be comfortable managing and organizing remote virtual teams
- be based in the U.S.
- have a sense of humor
Drupal Voices 77: Doug Green on Lessons from Big Multilingual Drupal sites
At DrupalCon Paris, Doug Green of CivicActions shared some insights doing big Multilingual sites. He talks about some of the pain points faced with doing the site, and working with the i18n module.
Other references mentioned:
sirkitree
dave
A great example of moodboards in action
At Headscape we have been using moodboards for some time as part of our design process. We believe that working with moodboards is considerably more effective than producing multiple design concepts.
They have the advantage of being quick and easy to produce. This means that, unlike design concepts, they are disposable. You can try lots of different approaches to find the one that works for both you and the client.
However, as I said in my post ‘How Moodboards Can Save Time, Money And Your Sanity!‘ they can be tricky to produce. Inexperienced web designers can often overwork moodboards making them more like a design concept than some initial ideas.
Moodboards in actionRecently I came across this concept video for Microsoft’s upcoming iPad competitor. Although the technology looks very impressive that was not what grabbed my attention. What impressed me was the moodboard they created to show off the technology. This is a great example of moodboards in action and demonstrates the kind of look and feel a moodboard should have.
Of course we don’t all have fancy (and as yet non-existent) tablets to create this kind of thing on. However, all of this could just as easily be achieved using a Wacom Bamboo Pen and Touch.
Hopefully this video inspires you to create freer, less structured moodboards that don’t take hours to craft.
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5 Powerful Ways to Improve Your Focus
Monday morning means back to work, ready or not. It can be difficult to shake off the weekend and get back to the grind, particularly if you’re still tired, overwhelmed with work, or just had a really great weekend that you aren’t thrilled to leave behind.
I’ve found that the harder you push for extra productivity during the first hour or two of back-to-work overwhelm, the easier the rest of the day — and sometimes week — will go. Here are my methods for increasing my focus and zeroing in on what really matters…on Monday morning or any other day.
Write Everything DownI’m a self-proclaimed list fanatic. I don’t know what I would do without my lists; I would be lost. I know there are anti-listmakers out there who can point out all of the reasons why lists are bad, but my lists are one of the tools I use to keep track of everything, prevent work from falling through the cracks and keep myself moving toward my productivity goals.
These lists come in many different shapes, sizes and formats, and one is my brain dump. When I find I am having difficulty focusing, I write down everything on my mind – distractions, things I’m worried about, high-priority actions I don’t want to forget.
Chunk ItOnce I have a clear mind, I move on to my short list of top priorities for the day, which I prepared the day before. I may have 3, 5 or even as many as 10 really important things to do. I take a quick look at this list and create “chunks” based on how long I think it will take me to complete each item.
Then, I use these chunks in one of two ways. I either focus on the smallest (in time) chunks first to clear them from my list. Or, I use the individual tasks within the chunks to break up more complex or time-consuming work. This helps me change up my work process on the fly so I can keep myself focused.
Analyze Time SpentIf you don’t regularly track your time, for both billable and nonbillable activities, I suggest you give it a try. The act of timing my work is two-fold. First, it keeps me focused on the task I’m working on right at that moment – there’s no better concentration reminder than a ticking clock. Second, it gives me a picture of where my time is being spent, day in and day out, over the long term. This helps me figure out where I need to work on my focus.
Think of the Finish LineWhen I’m in the midst of a particularly intense task, it always helps me to think of finishing it. Going back to my list obsession, the single act of crossing out an item on my list can do wonders for my concentration and determination to get it done.
Cut DistractionsIt’s a challenge, but the only way to get completely focused is by getting rid of distractions. This takes planning in advance and changing your habits to be effective, but once you become aware of all that’s distracting you, you can eliminate it so your focus improves.
See The Ultimate Guide to Killing Work-at-Home Distractions for some suggestions for tackling some of the most common distractions.
What do you to do regain focus when you find your mind straying?
Image credit: chriswoods
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Boagworld at sxsw
SXSW Interactive is almost certainly the biggest conference in the web communities calendar. Covering everything from CSS to Social Media it really has something for everyone.
This year, almost the entire Headscape crew is flying over and we hope to be reporting live on everything we see.
However, we are keen not to flood you with SXSW posts unless you are really interested. That is why we have decided to setup a separate posterous blog dedicated solely to posts from SXSW.
If you are interested in following what is happening at this years conference then I recommend you follow this blog and also our dedicated SXSW twitter account.
Boagworld @ SXSW Twitter Account
If you are at SXSWIf you are at SXSW and would like to meet up there are a copy of opportunities.
First, there is my presentation on Pain Free Design Sign Off that is happening on Saturday at 9.30AM in Ballroom A.
Second, I am also doing a book signing at the SXSW book stand on Saturday at 11.20AM.
Even if you are not interested in my talk or getting my booked sign please come along. I love to meet new people and don’t want to feel like ‘billy no mates’.
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Design Tweets of the Week Ending 07/03/2010
Here are just a few of the design-related tweets that crossed my laptop this week.
Darren Hoyt asks an interesting question on his blog about whether designers should “design over a period of years in a consistent, signature style” or be versatile enough to change their style with each new job.
In an excellent article, MIX discusses the future of wireframes. Just don’t call a UX professional a designer!
The Gutenberg rule points out a user behavior called reading gravity which is the western habit of reading left-to-right, top-to-bottom. Muiomuio looks at the Gutenberg diagram.
An article from 2005 (seems like a really long time ago by web standards) by Mark Boulton on the first of “Five simple steps to better typography.”
More looking into the future in an article on Smashing Magazine. The post discusses the Future Of CSS Typography.
There’s a very good read on iPad application design by Matt Gemmel. He talks about some of the interesting opportunities. “The iPad is a target for apps from the desktop, not just from smartphones.”
On the Ignore The Code website, Lukas Mathis writes about Realism In Design and makes particular mention of design of application icons.
Chris Coyier illustrates how to speed up the use of gradients in CSS3 and how different browsers handle them.
Sketching is a key step in the design process. The Design Informer asks the question “to sketch or not to sketch?” As well as being a good read, it’s also a nicely designed post.
And finally, according to the Oatmeal, here’s what happens when a web design goes to hell.
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Microsoft Fix Their Non-Random Browser Choice Screen
Here’s an interesting mathematics and computer science question: how random is Microsoft’s new EU browser choice screen? It’s not, according to several statistical analysis articles published during the past week.
IBM engineer Rob Weir has produced one of the better reports about the browser ordering on browserchoice.eu. The non-randomness is quite complex and it didn’t necessarily favor Internet Explorer; IE appeared last half the time and Chrome was more likely to appear in the first 3 positions.
Bringing Chaos from OrderGenerating random numbers on a digital device is not easy. Most implementations use a mathematical function which returns a pseudo-random number. It may appear random, but the sequence is predictable. However, this is not the issue Microsoft encountered.
There are various algorithms to ‘randomly’ shuffle an array of items but, according to Rob Weir, Microsoft chose the worst one. They used the following JavaScript comparison function for array.sort():
function RandomSort(a,b) { return (0.5 - Math.random()); }Since the comparison function returns a random result, the sorting process would receive inconsistent information regarding its progress. It could perform no swaps or, in theory, it could continue indefinitely. Ultimately, the results are not uniformly random.
Weir suggests Microsoft should have used the Fisher-Yates shuffle. In essence, this randomly picks an item from the source array and moves it to the end of a destination array. The process continues until all items from the original array have been moved.
Does it Matter?In my opinion — no. Most individuals will see the screen once or twice. Shuffling inconsistencies do not become apparent until you examine population samples containing thousands of users.
But do Microsoft need further legal wrangles? For all you lawyers excitedly anticipating a long-winded technical case about browser bias — you’re too late. Microsoft has changed their array shuffling algorithm:
function ArrayShuffle(a) { var d, c, b=a.length; while(b) { c=Math.floor(Math.random()*b); d=a[--b]; a[b]=a[c]; a[c]=d; } }Given a five-element array, the function will loop through elements 4 to 0 (variable b). A random number is generated between 0 and b (variable c). Elements b and c are then swapped. It’s not the Fisher-Yates algorithm, but it’s much better and will certainly end after 5 iterations (although it could end after 4 since the last element will always be swapped with itself).
I suspect it will result in a more uniform random distribution of browser positions. Eager statisticians will certainly be scrutinizing the results!
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Stop Being Annoying! How NOT to Promote Your Business on Facebook
The “best” way to use social networks is always subjective because what works for me may not work for someone else. So I’ll say up front that this post is entirely based on my own preferences and experiences, although I suspect that there are others out there who feel the same…or maybe you think some of the things I do on Facebook are highly annoying. Weigh in with a comment below and maybe we can create an outline of best practices for using Facebook for business promotion.
Here’s what you should not be doing on Facebook (according to me) to promote your business.
Abuse Group MessagesI am a member of a handful groups on Facebook, and there are a few that send constant messages to group members. This isn’t bad by itself, but when the messages are entirely self-promotional, unrelated to the purpose of the group, or sent daily, it’s a major turn off.
Unlike fan pages, messages to a group are treated as regular mail, so they hit members in their inbox and as an email notification if members have that option set in their preferences. This means it’s nearly impossible to ignore group messages that you have no interest in without leaving the group, which I have done in the past to end the annoyance.
Use the Same (Really Long) Status All the TimeOne of the best features about Facebook is the ability to easily share short updates with your friends. Not only does this microblogging feature give us a chance to get to know each other better, a little bit at a time, but it also provides an opportunity to direct friends to a website, news item, video or announcement in an unobtrusive way.
It becomes almost offensive, though, when the status update is used for publishing mini blog posts, sales letters or other material that doesn’t really fit into the purpose of the status update. And even worse, using that same status update all the time. This is a quick way to get blocked from my news feed.
Assume Everyone Is On TwitterMany of us use both Facebook and Twitter, so there can be a lot of overlap between our friends and followers. And many of us also use separate apps or the new built-in functionality that lets us post status updates in both places simultaneously. This is great in many cases because it makes it a lot easier to share information.
However, because Facebook and Twitter are very different animals, sometimes this double posting can be ineffective. For example, if you have your preferences set to publish everything you post on Twitter to Facebook, and if you tweet, retweet and/or use hashtags a lot, the value may be lost in the Twitter-to-Facebook translation.
Friend BlindlyA lot about social networks, especially when used for business promotion, is a numbers game. The more people you are connected to, the more visibility you have and (hopefully) the more traction you will get when it comes to marketing. But, to me, this doesn’t mean you should blindly and generically friend everyone.
Just because Facebook suggests that you may know someone who has some of the same friends as you, doesn’t mean you have to friend them. And if you do friend someone you don’t personally know, it’s really nice to add a note to your friend invitation. Don’t make me guess who you are and why I might want to connect with you. And extra points if your personal note actually addresses me by name.
Those are my top four ways not to use Facebook for business. Now it’s your turn. What’s your advice on how to use Facebook for business without annoying your connections?
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My Grand Mac Tour
I am a productivity nut. It’s an obsession really. As a result I have all kinds of little apps and tricks I use to streamline my working life. In this video I show you a few and hopefully introduce you to some applications you have never used before.
Some of the applications mentioned include…
- Omnifocus
- Delibar
- Tweetie
- Quix
- ExpanDrive
- Dropbox
- Hazel
- droplr
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- Rocketbox
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SitePoint Podcast #51: Real Web Designers Get It
Episode 51 of The SitePoint Podcast is now available! This week your hosts are Patrick O’Keefe (@ifroggy), Stephan Segraves (@ssegraves), Brad Williams (@williamsba), and Kevin Yank (@sentience).
Listen in your BrowserPlay this episode directly in your browser! Just click the orange “play” button below:
Download this EpisodeYou can also download this episode as a standalone MP3 file. Here’s the link:
- SitePoint Podcast #51: Real Web Designers Get It (MP3, 46.2MB)
The SitePoint Podcast is on iTunes! Add the SitePoint Podcast to your iTunes player. Or, if you don’t use iTunes, you can subscribe to the feed directly.
Episode SummaryHere are the topics covered in this episode:
- Corporates continue to cling to IE 6
- Chrome’s new automatic translation feature
- Opera 10.5 features amazing speed and powerful developer features
- Listener mail: Simon Madine on Chrome extensions
- SitePoint author Elliot Jay Stocks says designers should be able to code their own designs
Browse the full list of links referenced in the show at http://delicious.com/sitepointpodcast/51.
Host Spotlights- Patrick: 28 Days of Diversity
- Stephan: Uniform – Sexy forms with jQuery
- Brad: “Mad Libs” Style Form Increases Conversion 25-40%
- Kevin: Petition to make “Hella” the prefix for 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000
Kevin: March 5th, 2010. New browser updates, whether web designers should be code-savvy, and prying IE6 from their cold, dead, hands. I’m Kevin Yank and this is the SitePoint Podcast #51: Real Web Designers Get It.
With us today Brad Williams from WebDevStudios, Stephan Seagraves from Houston Texas, and Patrick O’Keefe of the iFroggy network.
We’ve got the whole band together again, guys.
Brad: What’s up?
Patrick: I missed you guys. I love you all so much.
Kevin: Coming up later on the show today we will look at the issue of whether web designers should be able to code their designs or not.
But first up, why you can’t pry IE 6 out of their cold, dead hands. This is a story by Esther Schindler over at IT Expert Voice, and she has done a little research into these Corporates—you know, Corporates with a capital ‘C’—that we’re always talking about. The last holdouts who have yet to move off of Internet Explorer 6. As of a few days ago, now, Google no longer officially supports Internet Explorer 6 in some of its applications, and this…
Brad: Yaaay!
Kevin: Yeah, I knew you’d be happy with that, Brad.
Patrick: Boo.
Kevin: As we’ve celebrated before on this show, this could be the beginning of the end of Internet Explorer 6, and in fact, if you head over to ie6funeral.com on Thursday, March 4th, you can see that some intrepid people in Denver got together to commemorate the occasion and have a funeral service for Internet Explorer 6. But it seems, reading this story, that there’s still some holdouts, Brad.
Brad: Yeah, and I think we’ve talked about it a few times on this show. And the major holdout is these corporations that have web apps that they need to run that were built for IE 6 exclusively, and that’s one of the biggest issues. It’s an interesting article, and I think one of my favorite quotes from the article is that most developers whom they asked about this issue had a violent, emotional response which kind of hit close to home, I think that would be my response too.
Kevin: That rings true. Yeah, we’ve had to edit out one or two of those from you from this show, Brad.
Brad: Maybe a couple bleeps here and there.
Kevin: Yeah, this story covers four different reasons that the reporter found for corporations sticking with Internet Explorer 6. Number one was they don’t upgrade anything. It’s nothing personal, it’s not that we’re dragging our heels on our browser, they don’t upgrade anything. She cited the fact that a lot of corporations operate on a three to five year upgrade cycle in their IT department. So, you know, every three to five years they sit down and they go alright, what’s the computer, what’s the operating system that we will be buying for the next three to five years. Five years is a really long time.
Brad: Yeah, it is. I think this one; I can definitely see this one. I worked at a small company for a while, a small internet-based company, and I basically was the IT department for about 30 people. And I’m a web developer, so that tells you how much of their budget they had to focus on that. And when it came time to upgrade, you know, it really was I would be the one kind of pushing saying you know we need to upgrade, and they really never saw the reasoning behind it. I guess the question I have with this one is I have a hard time believing that if they don’t upgrade anything that they’re out there traversing the Internet and they’re not running into problems running on IE 6. I got to believe that almost any website they go to, the majority of websites are going to have some kind of IE 6 hang up at this point.
Patrick: Well, the only thing I have to add is: Hi, Mrs. Schindler. We talk on email and Twitter, and I’ve talked to her a number of times, and I was…
Kevin: Really?
Patrick: …surprised to see her name at the bottom of this. But also, great, I didn’t put it in there, just so you know, I work with great folks.
Kevin: No, no, this is my story.
Patrick: No, but I think this is an interesting site because this Expert Voice site is created through partnership with Dell and Federated Media, so Dell is at least partially behind this. The writer isn’t really affiliated with it. So, it’s interesting to consider from that angle too. And what Dell has at stake, I guess. And why Dell would want people to upgrade on top of it. Dell would sort of be in the same camp of developers because people who upgrade buy new computers. So, you know, I mean that’s all a part of this puzzle too. And I think it’s just going to be time. I think you can only stay on that old box for so long, and eventually they’re either going to disappear or they’re going to buy a new box. So, it’s just a matter of time and, I don’t know, I get kind of tired of talking about— of hearing people complain about IE 6 and stuff. Oh, yeah, I mean it’s been complained about so, so much that it’s almost like a cliché at this point to complain about IE 6. But that’s just me.
Brad: I mean, you know, you say time, and I think that it’s a good point. But time is definitely running short, and now that Google has kind of stepped up as one of the big players and taken that first step, even if it’s a small step, they definitely took a step in the right direction. So, you’re right, it’s definitely a matter of time. The question is, are we talking months, are we talking years, I hope we’re not talking multiple years.
Patrick: Just sit back, have a beverage, and you know, chill out. Not Brad, but other people. Brad’s already Mr. Cool.
Kevin: The next reason covered in this story is the one we mentioned, and the one that always comes up: one critical IE 6 only application holds them back. The company’s built a custom app and they cut corners back in the days where IE 6 was the only browser, and there was no reason to worry about supporting anything else going forward, and so they’re stuck there. And that’s— It’s the hardest problem to solve, but at the same time in some ways I’m most optimistic about it being solved because once we move off IE 6 the browser landscape is moving so quickly again now that it seems unlikely that companies building custom apps today are going to make that same mistake.
Stephan: You’d think that they’d want to update the internal application anyway because it sounds like it was probably built in early 2000.
Kevin: Well, the story says it’s difficult to justify because when you pitch it to your bosses who hold the purse strings of the company you’re saying, “Look, I want to update this application to work in newer browsers.” And they say, “Well, what’s it going to do different?” And you go, “Nothing, it’ll just work in more browsers,” and no one’s going to pay for that.
Patrick: So what’s the benefit to the company in that case is the real question. And I mean there isn’t one. I mean this isn’t that surprising. And she said it’s unsurprising, so there it is. But, I was looking at some … it was surveillance software, a while back, and I opened the application to view surveillance from a remote location, and it looked like it was built in 1995. I mean it was this Java app, and it’s nothing about Java, I’m not saying Java, but just kind of the gray Java huge buttons, and it was like this is so old. But the thing about it is I was thinking I guess they don’t have any reason to innovate, they don’t have any reason to update. Who’s their competition? They already have their clients, and apparently in this space they’re eating off that. So, you know, it’s like the same thing as medical care in my area, I live in a small area; there’s not that many doctors, they’re not competing against each other. If you don’t have competition, you have less reason to innovate. I mean that plays a hand as well.
Kevin: Are you saying your doctor uses Internet Explorer 6?
Brad: I would get a new doctor.
Patrick: I’m saying that when there’s less competition— I don’t judge doctors based on their browser usage.
Brad: I judge everybody based on their browser usage.
Patrick: I think there’d be a lot of dead web developers if we went that route. Well, aren’t you Mr. Judgmental! Excuse me, I’ll get off your Twitter. No, I’m just kidding.
No, but what I’m saying is that obviously competition drives innovation, and in some of these spaces you’re dealing with companies that all in all probably don’t care much about the web browser, so that’s why there’s a lack of necessity to move to it.
Brad: Just one last point. One kind of low-cost solution to this would be just to use something like VMWare, or even set up a PC in the corner of the office that’s just dedicated to running IE 6 and allow the different users that need to get into that system remote access. Yeah, that way they could login when they need to, they can use the application.
Brad: It’s a low-cost way of getting around it. So if your sticking point is saying we have this mission critical application we have to use, well, you know, there’s certainly ways you can still use it, but you don’t have to be stuck on IE 6 on your day-to-day computer.
Kevin: The next point is “Why do software maintenance? It isn’t broken.” is a common response she saw. And part of reading this story comes out of the fact that a lot of Corporates outsource their IT infrastructure, and to the point where the people who they go to for advice on their IT are also outsourced. And so there’s no one there to tell them that their systems are out of date, that there is even a reason to upgrade. And when someone like a web developer tells them, “Hey, I want to build you a modern web application, but your IT infrastructure’s too out of date,” they go and talk to their IT consultants and they say, nah, there’s no reason. And you end up hearing things like, “Your customers are also on IE 6, and so you should keep your business on that lowest common denominator so that you’re getting the same experience as them.” It’s like these companies, these outsourced IT providers, are trying to make excuses and give companies reasons to stay behind on this stuff. It seems weird because they could make a load off of charging these companies for an upgrade, right?
Brad: Yeah, you’d think they’d want to push it. I mean I guess it’s tough to tell someone by spending money now you’re going to save more money in the long run, but essentially getting off of IE 6 that’s probably what’s going to happen, because eventually with the IE 6 security something’s going to happen whether it’s a computer gets infected or a virus hits your network through an IE 6 browser. Whatever it may be, something’s going to happen and it’s probably going to cost you more in the long run anyway to clean up that mess and then upgrade rather than just upgrade now and completely avoid that mess in the future. But, again, it’s always hard to argue that point with people that are holding those purse strings.
Patrick: I guess the unanswerable question is, on a company by company basis, if a company has put off upgrading for X amount of time, and there’s been versions released, multiple versions from IE 6 now, the money that they may have saved paying someone to upgrade their entire network to go directly to IE 8 or do a full refresh, have they actually lost money by doing that, or have they actually saved money by waiting to upgrade as long as they could? And I mean that’s unanswerable. For some it’s less, for some they lose money, for some they gain money. But, you know, from a business perspective only I don’t know if I can fault the IT consultants completely, but obviously they have to find a way to relate it to the business that shows them, okay, X amount of dollars, you do this, and it’s tough to do that.
Kevin: The last point in the story is IE 6 as user control. And I find this fffff… frustrating and fascinating at the same time. The point here is more and more as companies like Google and Facebook and so on, cut support for Internet Explorer 6, keeping your corporate employees on Internet Explorer 6 becomes a way of insuring they don’t go to these non work-related sites and waste time on your dollar. This is the logic that we’re seeing, that these companies go, “Oh, you can’t use Facebook on IE 6? How interesting. Let’s lock that in for another few years, shall we?”
There’s a great interview on a show called Spark on CBC radio, and they have a podcast that I’ll be sure to link to, where they talk about this shift in culture with companies that have started to put up firewalls for their employees that prevent them from accessing “inappropriate” sites during work times. And some of the have very graciously started switching off the firewall at lunch hour so that on your lunch break you can go and browse Facebook as much as you want. But then as soon as the lunch break is over it clamps back down again. And on the surface this sounds like a nice compromise, a good gesture for a company that might otherwise not allow any non work-related internet access at your desk. But what they’re seeing is that employees who used to go outside and get some fresh air and reinvigorate themselves for the rest of the day at their lunch hour, instead stay pinned at their desk surfing the Web madly for the one hour that they have access to it before they have to go back to work. It decreases productivity and the health of their employees. It’s counterintuitive, but it’s going to cost them money.
Patrick: Now if we could only find a way to shut down the albatross that is solitaire.
Kevin: I thought that was dealt with. Switch everyone to Mac, right?
Brad: Yeah, Macs don’t run games.
Patrick: Mac doesn’t believe in playing cards.
Kevin: Well, that’s Internet Explorer 6 and why we can’t pry it out of their cold, dead hands. It seems like there is reason for optimism on several of those fronts. If anything, you won’t be able to buy a computer that runs Internet Explorer 6 in a few years.
Stephan: Well, what about the fact that pretty soon you’re going to have to run Vista, right? Or Windows 7 now, I’m sorry. That pretty much knocks IE 6 out, right? Once these companies start upgrading to 7 you’re not going to have to worry about it.
Kevin: Yeah, but for some companies what it will take literally is for these computers to catch fire and explode.
Patrick: Way to give everyone ideas.
All: (laughing)
Kevin: Just sayin’! If your computer happened to catch fire…
Patrick: SitePoint podcast triggers series of break-ins at corporations in Australia, UK!
Stephan: There’s a bunch of IT guys just— They’re planning and plotting right now.
Kevin: “Interesting.” Next week on the SitePoint Podcast, which part of your computer is most flammable?
So while we’re talking about browsers, let’s talk about some of the other browsers out there because there’s a whole bunch of news. We’ve got a new Beta of Chrome, Google Chrome, that has I think I might call it Google’s first original browser feature.
And I’m sure someone’s going to write in and tell me that Opera has had this for years, but maybe not. The latest Chrome Beta has automatic website translation. So if you tell it you want to read your websites in English and it detects that a website that you load up is in German, it will automatically send it through Google’s translation engine and show you the English version. This is in the Beta version of Chrome, right?
Brad: Yeah, the Beta version just came out for Windows I believe. It’s really neat though because since it auto detects, so if you hit a Chinese website, it auto detects that the language is Chinese, and then pops up and asks if you want to translate. Pick your language, you can save it, and then going forward you can just click translate and it will remember the translation language you chose. So it’s really quick, it detects it, you click translate and it’s done, and then it translates the website as you navigate through it.
Kevin: So what’s the benefit here? I mean have you guys found yourselves really wanting to read non-English websites a lot and then been frustrated by your inability to do so automatically?
Stephan: I’d say biggest issue for me it’s travel websites for other countries, small airlines that I can’t— they don’t have English versions. That would come in handy but other than that, I don’t use it really.
Brad: I mean on occasion for me I’ve come across sites where it will be in a different language and then I have to dig up the translate URL and paste in the link. But what this might open up is that Google could actually… if this proves to work really well over a period of time or whatever, Google might actually, who knows, they might open up to where we start if you’re running Chrome and they detect that you’re using the translate they might start bringing back more foreign websites in your search results if they deem them relevant. Possibly, who knows. I could see them trying something like that.
Yeah, it’s kind of neat. It’s definitely a feature I haven’t seen. But, again, like you said, Kevin, it might exist in some other browser.
Kevin: Well, I’m sure there’s a Firefox extension for doing this kind of thing. There’s a Firefox extension for everything. We hear stories of like the size of the non-English Internet is eclipsing the size of the English Internet. And so perhaps just the fact that we use the Internet as English speakers, as English readers, we tend to have blinkers on to the rest of the Internet. We limit our access to the information and knowledge and cultural styles that are out there on the Internet for us to explore. If Chrome is leading the way and all browsers end up implementing this we could suddenly find the Web becoming a place where you don’t worry about the language of a site that you’re putting a hyperlink to. You just transparently surf from site to site, and some of them are automatically translated, and some of them just happen to be English. This could really knock down some big walls that they exist on the Internet today, if only by our tendency to only link to and take an interest in stuff that’s written in English.
Patrick: That’s a cool visionary type statement. I think that’s a good thing. I think that would be a great thing. I think he question, though, is of course always with translation tools, the quality of those tools, right? So for that to happen, like Google Translate, I’ve used it over a period of time. I used to use Babblefish back in the day, and it’s pretty good, but you know, there are points where it obviously comes back broken in English, right? And I think that’s a hindrance, and I don’t know what the answer is to that; if there’s more investment needed into translation, if Google’s now going to corner the market on translation services that could be another business for them. But obviously the quality of translation is a big factor in this.
Kevin: I’m trying to read up here on how Google actually detects the language of a web page. I mean obviously those who know their HTML in real detail know that you can tag the language of a page or even the language of a paragraph in your HTML code if you want to go to that extent. But I’d say most of us are guilty of just not specifying a language and assuming the browser’s going to be in English because you’re writing an English website, right? So, to some extent I expect that Google Chrome is doing some automatic detection based on the words it sees. And the Mashable story that we link to for this says they’ve had some, they’ve noticed some sites with not a lot of text on them are not correctly detected as being in another language. But you can always force its hand and tell it, “Hey, can you translate this for me?” which is cool.
Our other bit of browser news is Opera 10.5 is out for Windows. And the Mac has a Beta version that’s very nice to check out as well, so it can’t be far away. Wow, Opera is really moving fast! It was February 11th that they announced the Beta of Opera 10.5 for Windows. And so like three weeks later they’ve got the final release out, that’s incredible.
Brad: The browser’s supposed to move pretty fast, too, from what I’ve read.
Kevin: Yeah, reading the release notes it looks like Opera 10, you know, we had designer Jon Hicks on to discuss the user interface work that was going into that release, and it seemed like Opera 10 was very much focused on the end user experience. For the end user Opera 10 was a completely new version, thus the major new version number. 10.5 feels like it’s something for us as web developers and designers because the look of the browser is a little tweaked, but it’s pretty much the same interface. But under the hood, geez, there’s almost nothing that hasn’t changed. They’ve completely replaced the JavaScript engine with a new engine called Carakan, which according to benchmarks is now the fastest currently released JavaScript engine among all current browsers out there. So, Opera takes the lead in JavaScript performance.
They’ve got a new graphics engine called Vega which brings hardware accelerated graphics to SVG, canvas and indeed all the graphics rendering in the browser. And this is something that Internet Explorer 9 has been giving a preview of, you know, that’s the next big thing that’s coming. So, Opera is ahead of Internet Explorer and many of the other browsers on this stuff. And then there’s improved CSS support, we’ve got rounded corners, multiple background images, box shadows, border images, CSS transforms and animated transitions, and offline storage, and finally, support for the <video> tag using the Ogg Theora video codec. So, it’s all in there. There is nothing in this that isn’t in this release that is in another browser that I could want.
Patrick: So are you using Opera, then?
Kevin: Well, it makes me want to use Opera as my development browser and pretend that I could use all these features today and assume that all of my audience is going to see them. As a user there’s something that’s keeping me off Opera, and that’s the 1Password plug-in that’s on all the other browsers. But that’s a— it seems like faint criticism. As a web standards nut, Opera has got my vote. This is the leading browser for me now.
Patrick: The JavaScript thing sounds like it’s a pretty big deal with them. You know if Safari did that type of thing Steve Jobs would be on stage saying “We did it again!”, and here’s the numbers compared between each browser, so I don’t know, maybe they need to do a better job of publicizing that. I don’t know, maybe it has been big news.
Kevin: Yeah, well, when Safari put out its last big JavaScript performance enhancement, Steve Jobs was, or the head of their desktop software division, I think when they were talking about Snow Leopard, from memory, they were showing off some graphs of browser performance and how they had doubled the speed of Safari. But it seems like they’ve been leapfrogged at this point.
Brad: I think speed is a really big topic among reasons why you switch. I mean it’s one of the reasons why I now use Chrome for all my day-to-day browsing just was because of speed. And if Opera’s coming out, and if benchmarks come out and shown that it is quite a bit faster than Chrome, that could be a big reason for people to start seriously considering switching to Opera.
Kevin: Well, Brad, put your money where your mouth is. If Opera is now the fastest browser, are you going to switch for us?
Brad: I’m definitely going to download it and run it. When 10 came out I played around with it and ran it a little bit. So I’ll install it this weekend and play around with it, so next step is I’ll remember to report back my findings.
Kevin: Alright, well, we’ll look forward to that. We’ve got some listener mail from Simon Madine who wrote in about podcast 47. And one of the things he touched on was our coverage of Opera. He says, “During the discussion of this technology and other browsers, there was reference to bookmarking extensions for Firefox and unsure mentions of Mozilla talk of a bookmarking API.” This is when we were talking about the new bookmark synching extension that had now become a core feature of Chrome. He says that what we missed out on is the fact that Opera has had bookmark synching, history, and notes, syncing of all that stuff, since version 9.5, since the public Beta of that browser was released. He says, “Although Opera isn’t the most popular browser it is certainly not trivial, and the hosts of a web development podcast should be aware of its features.”
Well, Simon, guilty. I hope our coverage of Opera in this show was a little more up to scratch.
Yeah, it’s tough. The browser world is moving so fast, like I said earlier, that it’s hard to stay on top of what’s new and what’s current in every single browser. So, yeah, definitely, Opera has full support for syncing all of that stuff. And so that’s why I say this translate tool, please do let me know if Opera already has it. I’m sure there are extensions for other browsers that do it. But this feels like the first thing that Google Chrome has done that the other browser haven’t, and that they may be taking the lead from— following Chrome’s lead on.
Simon Madine goes on to say he takes exception to my description of bookmark synching as a nichey feature. He says, “Non-IE browsers are most commonly used by technically-minded people, many of whom will have a desktop and a laptop, or use a computer at home as well as the office. Bookmark synching can be useful to any of these people.”
I don’t know. Stephan, what’s your feeling? Is Chrome targeted at techie users?
Stephan: I don’t know, maybe. Kind of, I guess, I mean Brad loves it, so.
Brad: What are you trying to say, Stephan?
All: (laughing)
Kevin: And Simon also talks about where I question the fact that the most popular extension for Chrome was also the newest feature for Chrome when it comes to bookmark synching. He says, “Surely an extension community that creates the kind of features they want their browser of choice to have is a healthy community. If the inclusion of the feature into the browser was expedited due to its popularity as a plug-in, that shows that the Chrome developers believe in the plug-in community enough to listen. If it wasn’t related it shows that they are heading in the same direction.”
I see what you mean there. I think it would be a bit disappointing as an extension developer to see wildly popular success of your extension, and your reward for that is Chrome taking that feature out of your hands and building it into the browser in the next release. I would be disappointed by that. But I do also see what you mean that if the user community of a browser is voting with their downloads for a feature, Google should definitely look at implementing those features in the core of the browser. I don’t know. What do you guys think?
Brad: I think any time you create extensions for a browser or plug-ins for a website, or whatever it may be, there’s always a chance that what you make could end up of the core software that you develop it for. And if it does I think it just kind of justifies and says you were right, you know, this is a great feature that everybody wants, so why add in that extra step to install it. But there always is that risk. I think as developers I mean you just always got to kind of keep that in mind that if it’s a very popular feature and not something that’s niche, it could very well end up as a core feature of anything.
Patrick: I reached out to Simon on Twitter when he posted a comment about the show, and I appreciate you taking me up on it and actually elaborating on the feedback which is very helpful. And I think you raised a lot of good points, and good points that would be great in our comment section of the Podcast. And I think that between us four we have a very little bit of knowledge, but we have a piece and we share that on the show, but at the same time I think we all, as users of technology and computers, we lean toward what we have good experience with and what we use ourselves. So, we may not know that Opera has had this feature since this point, or that Safari’s coming out with this next week.
But I think the SitePoint community is part of what makes the Podcast so great. So I would say that if you notice that we omit something or that we forget an aspect that you personally feel should have been included or should be addressed, then please use our comment section and point it out, and add that viewpoint—add your viewpoint—in a productive way. And you’re a part of the podcast, part of the community, and maybe we’ll even read it on the show. But part of the power of the community is all of our knowledge together; so thank you for sharing that.
Kevin: Thank you, Simon. And speaking of talking about things we don’t know a lot about…
This brings us to the story of web designers and whether they should be able to code the designs they come up with. Friend of the show, Elliot Jay Stocks, and SitePoint author, tweeted this week, “Honestly I’m shocked that in 2010 I’m still coming across ‘web designers’ who can’t code their own designs. No excuse.”
This created a bit of a storm of controversy, and CSSquirrel, another friend of the show, has a great sort of summary of all the opinions that were put forward in response to this. We’ll link to that post in the show notes. But, Elliott J. Stocks came back with quite a long and detailed post explaining his position here. But before we get into that, guys, I’m interested in your thoughts. Obviously none of us here consider ourselves web designers as our primary function, but what do you think? When you work with a web designer do you expect them to have an understanding of the code that goes into implementing what it is they’re designing in Photoshop?
Brad: I do. As far as I do have a company that builds websites, and we actually have a lot of clients that show up on our doorstep. They already have a designer they work with who’s already made a mock-up of what they want; they just don’t know how to build it. And that’s where they search and find us or find another company that can take that mock-up and convert it into a website by whatever means. It’s tough to say, I guess it’s hard to say that all designers should know how to do that. I think if a designer isn’t actively trying to learn how to do that then I would kind of question how into design they actually are. Just from my perspective I want to know everything about building websites that I can. And if there’s new things I need to learn then I want to go out there and learn them so that I know. I would think from a designer’s standpoint if they don’t know how to take their design and put it on a, you know, build a website around it, they should kind of yearn to want to know how to do that. I would think so, but that’s just me.
Patrick: I think it depends on the project. I think that obviously we communicate these things beforehand. If we expect someone to do the entire development project, to design something and code it, then that’s usually communicated beforehand. I just wonder if maybe we’re getting— And I’m least of all designer of all us here, but I wonder if we’re getting too bogged down in semantics or terms. So, if you have a design company and you have one person who’s an awesome coder, coding sustainer, he’s just amazing. And then you have one person who is a visual genius design-wise in Photoshop coming up with designs and mock-ups and whatever, is that person not a designer or a web designer? Do you have to code to be the, “web designer?” I mean where are we at with this? I still think that that person who has the design vision may not know how to code XHMTL, whatever, HTML 5 standard compliant code. But I don’t think he’s any less of a talented designer.
Brad: But if you’re a web designer, don’t you think you should know how to design for the Web? It’s like I would take that web word off and just say I’m a designer. If I don’t know how to code my design into a web page I’m not a web designer, I’m a designer.
Patrick: What’s design for the Web though? Is design for the Web a concept of an idea of what is intuitive of people using a web browser, or is it simply, you know, letters and numbers in a text document. I think that there is something to be said for actual layout and the typography and those things that go into maybe creating a design, but not necessarily being the one who perfects the code that displays that design.
Kevin: I’ve recently been working on a project to do a new site design for the theatre company that I perform with in my spare time. And this designer he is very much a print designer who will do a web design if you ask him to. But he doesn’t have a strong understanding of the constraints that are unique to the browser space, you know, the fact that pages tend to be fixed width but stretchy vertically is kind of something that isn’t in his visual language. And so the types of designs that he will tend to come up with he’ll get a poster, for example, he’ll get the page size, and he’ll design within that box. Whereas with the Web you really need to be clear about things like where your design will stretch when the content is bigger or smaller, and what happens with different types of content. If you’ve got a large image or a small image that needs to fit in this content, how are those displayed on different pages and how does that impact the rest of the layout? I sat down with him and tried to give him a sort of crash course in the constraints that he needs to be aware of as he develops a visual treatment for the wireframes that I had produced for the site, and I found it really challenging to put that into words.
Brad, when these clients come to you with a finished design that their designer has done, have you ever looked at it and go, “Well, that looks pretty on the page, it looks pretty in Photoshop, but I can’t turn that into a working website?”
Brad: Yeah, I mean absolutely. I’ve had mock-ups where every font is some kind of custom font that isn’t web safe, and they’re like, alright well, we can certainly use graphics for these, but you really don’t want to use graphics if you don’t have to. You want to keep your site very lightweight as much as possible. Yeah, certainly font is one of the biggest things because people think they can use any type of font they want when it’s not really the case. It’s a great point, you’re right, there is kind of some things that you know, that the page can’t stretch or you know there’s web safe fonts, and web safe colors, and things like that that they really need to keep in mind when they’re making these designs. I would probably argue that most web designers understand that. Like you said, the guy you were working with was a print designer, so obviously someone from that background may not be as familiar with that.
Stephan: Okay, if we flipped it around and we said if you call yourself a developer and someone asked you to develop a website for them, and you come back with a database diagram and some pseudo-code, what are they going to do with that?
Kevin: It’s done! (claps hands)
Patrick: I don’t think that’s an adequate comparison, I have to say, because …
Stephan: Oh, it’s completely accurate.
Patrick: …there is such a thing as a layout designer. I would suggest that you can have the understanding that Kevin talks about, as far as the limitations of the Web, while also not being someone who can hand-code to the highest standard. I would suggest that you can have those design understandings without the extreme coding knowledge. But that’s just me.
Stephan: But you just laid out the terms. You just said it’s a— you didn’t use “web designer,” you used a different word, “layout designer.”
Patrick: Sure, but that’s the question I asked earlier, are we getting too semantic. I mean is this a case of simply “you’re doing it wrong?” I mean is there no room— I guess the question is do we really want to get so technical that someone who is designing for the Web has a visual understanding of what the Web entails, but necessarily might not be the greatest coder, and as such, has someone else do it. If they just enjoy designing do they also need to enjoy coding?
Stephan: I’ll say this, if I see someone who can design really well and they do a really great job on layout and maybe they don’t know how to code, I’ll pay them for the layout, or for just what they’ve designed with the look. Because I like their work and I can get someone else to code it. So it doesn’t stop me from hiring them. I’ll throw that out there because I appreciate good art, I appreciate good work.
Brad: I would love to hear from anyone in the community that is maybe close to graduating college in the graphic design field, or especially web design. I know I worked with quite a few designers that were more print designers as well a few years ago, and they were kind of dabbling more and more into web, and I kept telling them you should really start looking into CSS, you should start learning CSS, and they absolutely did not want to learn CSS, they felt like that was too code-y, I guess if that is a good term to describe that. And then a year or two later they now realize, okay, I’m not behind the curve in the job market, and everybody I’m up against as a graphic designer understands CSS or at least understands a little bit about it, whereas this person had no clue. I think that’s more the trend in a lot of— I’m sure a lot of colleges now are pushing that. If you’re in graphic design you’re also going to start dabbling in CSS and learning CSS at the college level.
Patrick: Just to be clear though, I’m not saying that you shouldn’t learn how to code or that it’s not a good idea. I feel opposite, but I’m just saying that I don’t know if we need to section people off in such a way based on whether or not they can code, that’s all.
Kevin: Yeah, it seems reading Elliot Jay Stocks’s larger blog post it seems he admits that you can design for the web without understanding the code, but the point he seems to be trying to make is if you consider that your career, if you consider that your metier, why would you limit yourself by not learning that? That’s like … it’s like deciding you’re going to be a writer in this day and age but not learning how to touch type. You could do that but you’re limiting yourself, and how can you call yourself a professional?
He says that he went through his own phase of designing without understanding the code of the Web. And when he finally did take the time to learn it he said it was incredibly freeing. And this is a quote from his blog post: he says, “The unknown was holding me back. I didn’t appreciate how things worked and it scared me away from producing my best work. But with a little bit of technical knowledge—and I’d really like to emphasize the ‘little’ here, I’m not much of a coder beyond HTML, CSS, and the odd bit of PHP for WordPress theming—I got the medium in which we work.” So that’s interesting to me that understanding the code for a web designer can be like understanding how paper is made for a print designer. You understand your medium intrinsically, and it frees you to play with it more.
Patrick: I think that’s a good point. I think his point about it being a career is a good one as well. I think at the end of the day if you are a designer who wants to stay in this field, knowing how to code HTML and CSS will certainly make you more attractive both to clients and to agencies.
Kevin: I’m really interested in if there is a designer— If you are listening to this and you are a web designer, or you design for the web and you don’t consider yourself proficient in CSS layout, for example, I’m really interested in hearing if that frees you. Because understanding the medium, while it can free you to play with it, it can also— If you think of the Web in terms of the code, it might limit you and prevent you from thinking of, or trying some visual things that may not have been tried before.
Patrick: After what we’ve said, that person is afraid to come forward.
Kevin: (laughing)
Stephan: And I think this discussion for me is difficult because I’m not at all visually savvy. So when I think of design I’m kind of like, well, put some tables on the page and put the form out there. So for me I can’t judge either way, you know, I can’t say well they must be a crappy designer because they can’t write HTML. I just— I can’t do it.
Kevin: And I think that sums it up where we started. We fully admit we’ve just spent 20 minutes talking about stuff of which we are not experts. So please do write in with your thoughts because I think this is a fascinating conversation, and I’d love to hear from some practitioners in the design field.
So, let’s get to our host’s spotlight guys. Patrick, what have you got for us this week?
Patrick: My host spotlight is 28daysofdiversity.com. It was put together by a friend of mine, Wayne Sutton, and in his words he says, “As someone in the technology/web social space, I often travel and attend various events in the industry and notice a huge lack of diversity. And when it comes to getting attention from mainstream media/tech blogs, it’s almost impossible.” So he says he started 28 Days of Diversity with the goal of featuring someone new every day of the month of February for just being awesome in their own right. And the full title is 28 Days of Diversity: People of Color Impacting the Social Web. It started on his blog at socialwayne.com, but it quickly morphed into its own site, 28daysofdiversity.com with all 28 people who were featured highlighted, their Twitter streams, and various other information as well. So it was a cool program and Wayne just completed it, so I wanted to highlight that.
Kevin: Yeah, that sounds great. So all the writers for this project were people of color you said?
Patrick: Yep. Well, it’s just Wayne running it and he’s selecting people to highlight every day of the month, just in a positive way, different people that are somehow impacting the social web. For example, there’s someone who works at Foursquare, someone who works at Ford, someone who is an IT director at a college here in North Carolina. And so on and so forth. Just people who are creating all different types of content and different spaces, different fields, but who have a noteworthy social media presence.
Kevin: Very cool. Stephan?
Stephan: Mine this week is something called Uniform. It’s put out by Pixel Matrix Design, and it basically ties in with jQuery to create uniform, standard form controls that you can custom theme across browsers, so you can make all your form controls look the same, look slick, and just using a theme that they give you an outline for. So, it’s really cool. It’s just a JavaScript library that you include along with jQuery, and it degrades gracefully in IE 6 and works in all the other browsers.
Kevin: Wow, that’s cool. We were talking about jQuery last week on the podcast, and yeah, I’ve been wanting to hear about some really neat jQuery plug-ins, and this has just made it to the top of my list. Thankyou, Stephan.
Stephan: It’s pretty sweet looking.
Kevin: Brad, what have you got?
Brad: My whole spotlight this week is a post by Luke Wroblewski, sorry, I’m sure I butchered that Luke, who is a chief design architect at Yahoo. And it’s an interesting take on a different way to layout your web forms. And basically Luke has kind of termed this as “Mad Libs”-style forms which are basically rather than have a form that’s just straight down, first name, last name, phone number, email, whatever field you’re asking for, it’s kind of a narrative format. So it basically presents input fields as blanks within a sentence.
For example, if you’re going to fill out a form that would say “Hello, my name is blank, blank,” you would fill in first name and last name, “I live at blank street address, and the blank zip code, please call me back at blank,” which is the phone number. So rather than just having a list it’s in a narrative format. And he actually did some A/B testing on this and found out that using the Mad Libs style form increased the conversion across the board between, or by 25 to 40 percent, which is pretty amazing.
And there were a few little differences in the form, the Mad Libs style form and the original form, but definitely not enough to kind of account for the whole increase in conversion. But a 25 to 40 percent increase in conversion rate is amazing. So it’s really kind of an interesting concept that I hadn’t seen before.
Kevin: I wonder how much of it is the novelty. To some extent on SitePoint, every time we do something that’s different than what we’ve done before, we see an immediate increase in the conversion rate, and we go, “Wow, we’ve discovered something that’s so much better!” But as often as not, six months later it’s performing worse than what we had before because the novelty has worn off. But this is really cool. I can’t tell you why but I want to fill in one of these forms.
Brad: Yeah, I do too. He has a couple links to some websites using it, like Kelley Blue Book is one that’s using it. So it’s pretty interesting. I might try, you know, maybe on a website we develop in the future try this out and just see how well it works. But definitely kind of an interesting little read.
Patrick: It sounds a lot like Match Game, my name is blank, I live in blank, you know, I don’t know if that’s dating myself here, Match Game the game show, if anyone here knows what that is! Now over to you Charles Nelson Reilly.
Brad: And as an added benefit, Luke’s blog is actually coded using classic ASP, which kind of has a soft spot in my heart since that’s one of my old languages. You don’t see that too often!
Kevin: Is it really classic ASP or is he just putting .asp on his URLs for old time’s sake?
Brad: It’s .asp and it has a query string ID, so I’m assuming, I didn’t really dig into it, but it looks like it is.
Kevin: So this explains to me at last why all the form elements are inline elements in HTML. You know if you just put a bunch of inputs one after another in your code they flow like a paragraph of text does. And that never seemed to me the way people use forms, but at last this Mad Lib forms, it all makes sense.
And my host spotlight this week is a blog post on Boing Boing, which is highlighting a petition to make “hella” the official SI prefix for 10 to the 27th. I’ll explain: you know megabytes and then terabytes, well hellabytes is going to be the proposed new name for things that have a one with 27 zeros after them. So one petabyte is a thousand terabytes, one exabyte is a thousand petabytes, one zetabyte is one thousand exabytes, one yottabyte is a thousand zetabytes, and now we’re proposing that one hellabyte will be a thousand yottabytes. I can’t tell you why I love this idea but I just do.
Stephan: It’s hella big.
Patrick: Welcome to holy sanctum of geekdom.
Kevin: (laughing) I usually have something a little code-y, but it sounded like you guys had that covered this week so there you go. If you think hellabytes should be the measure for traffic on the internet or as mentioned on the Boing Boing story the US national debt, sign the petition.
Patrick: That’s a little too vulgar to me. I think I’d prefer heckabytes.
Kevin: Heckabytes.
Stephan: Heckabytes.
Kevin: And that brings us to the end of the show. We are:
Brad: I’m Brad Williams from WebDevStudios. Check out my blog strangework.com, and you can find me on Twitter @williamsba.
Patrick: I’m Patrick O’Keefe of the iFroggy network, iFroggy.com, and I’m on Twitter @iFroggy.
Stephan: And I’m Stephan Seagraves. You can find me on Twitter @sseagraves and my blog is badice.com.
Kevin: You can follow me on Twitter @sentience and SitePoint @sitepointdotcom. Visit the SitePoint podcast at sitepoint.com/podcast to leave comments on the show, let us know what we missed or we were, you know, talking out of our butts and to subscribe to receive every show automatically.
The SitePoint Podcast is produced by Carl Longnecker, and I’m Kevin Yank. Thanks for listening. Bye bye.
Theme music by Mike Mella.
Thanks for listening! Feel free to let us know how we’re doing, or to continue the discussion, using the comments field below.
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202. Rocket Surgery Made Easy
This week: the search for inspiration, using CSS3, ecommerce tips and why the browser landscape in Europe is about to change.
Interview: Monthly usability testing with Steve KrugSteve Krug, usability expert and author of “Don’t make me Think”, shares with us his unique approach to usability.
Interview: Building better forms with Steve MarshallSteve Marshall from Yahoo! draws on his many years of experience to share with us best practice in form design.
Read this week’s interview
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Creating Beveled Images with CSS
Recently, I wanted a simple CSS method for adding a beveled effect to images. It’s easy enough to create a sense of depth with normal outset borders (below left), but I was after an effect that would actually look like part of the image, as though it were a bevel on the image itself (below right).
In the end I found four different ways of doing it, each with different levels of support: from the cleanest approach that only worked in one browser, to the most robust that works in everything back to IE6.
All of them work on the same core principal; black borders for shade and white borders for highlighting are overlaid on top of an image, and then blended with some form of opacity. In each case, browsers without support for that technique will simply show the image as normal.
Technique 1: Using Generated Content on the Image (Demo)- Pros: Ultra-clean technique requires no additional markup
- Cons: Only works in Opera
With this first technique we create a pseudo-element using :after, then style it to be perfectly overlaid on top of the image. Then we add borders to the overlaid element, and use RGBA to define each border color: the top and left borders are rgba(255,255,255,0.4), white with 40% opacity; and the bottom and right borders are rgba(0,0,0,0.4), black with 40% opacity:
img.beveled { position:relative; } img.beveled:after { position:absolute; left:0; top:0; display:block; content:"\00a0"; box-sizing:border-box; width:100%; height:100%; border:5px solid; border-color:rgba(255,255,255,0.4) rgba(0,0,0,0.4) rgba(0,0,0,0.4) rgba(255,255,255,0.4); } <img class="beveled" src="stormtroopers.jpg" alt="A legion of Lego Stormtroopers, standing in formation." />This technique only works in Opera because no other browser supports generated content on multimedia replacement elements like <img> and <object>. But since we’re only addressing Opera, we have the freedom to use box-sizing and 100% dimensions, rather than having to define the dimensions explicitly.
(Note: the value of the content property in all these examples is a unicode non-breaking space. This is added because pseudo-elements have to contain something or they’re not rendered.)
Technique 2: Using Generated Content on a Wrapper Element (Demo)- Pros: Wider range of supported browsers
- Cons: Requires additional markup and explicit dimensions
The second technique is essentially the same as the first, but this time we create the overlay element using generated content on a wrapper <span> for browsers that don’t support generated content on the <img> itself. For this technique we also need to begin defining explicit dimensions on the wrapper element and the generated content (although we could use vendor-specific versions of box-sizing on the generated content, we’d still have to define the dimensions of the wrapper, so we may as well do the same for both):
span.beveled { position:relative; width:200px; height:200px; display:block; } span.beveled:after { position:absolute; left:0; top:0; display:block; content:"\00a0"; width:190px; height:190px; border:5px solid; border-color:rgba(255,255,255,0.4) rgba(0,0,0,0.4) rgba(0,0,0,0.4) rgba(255,255,255,0.4); } <span class="beveled"> <img src="stormtroopers.jpg" alt="A legion of Lego Stormtroopers, standing in formation." /> </span> Technique 3: Using Shadows instead of Borders (Demo)- Pros: The most visually attractive technique
- Cons: Only works in Firefox 3.5 or later
The third technique is a diversion from the second, where instead of using RGBA borders we’re using -moz-box-shadow:inset to create the beveling effect. Since box shadow effects have an alpha gradient (rather than the same opacity at all points), the overall effect is much prettier and more rounded; and the spread radius parameter can be subtly used to blend away the corner sharpness.
This effect is only supported in Firefox 3.5 or later; although Safari does implement box-shadow (as -webkit-box-shadow), there’s no support for inset:
span.beveled { position:relative; width:200px; height:200px; display:block; } span.beveled:after { position:absolute; left:0; top:0; display:block; content:"\00a0"; width:200px; height:200px; -moz-box-shadow:-5px -5px 2px rgba(0,0,0,0.4) inset, 5px 5px 2px rgba(255,255,255,0.4) inset; } <span class="beveled"> <img src="stormtroopers.jpg" alt="A legion of Lego Stormtroopers, standing in formation." /> </span>I suppose we could have added a -webkit version anyway, in the hope of forward compatibility, but that would be a risk since we can’t know what any future implementation will be like — it might be worse than nothing!
Technique 4: Everybody’s Happy (Demo)- Pros: Works in all modern browsers
- Cons: Requires more additional markup and explicit dimensions
The fourth and final technique is the most cross-browser compatible, but also requires the most HTML modification. It’s essentially the same as the second technique, but with two important differences: firstly, it uses a second physical <span> rather than generated content; and secondly, it uses ordinary hex border colors rather than RGBA, and then blends the whole element with opacity. Even Internet Explorer can handle this:
span.beveled { position:relative; width:200px; height:200px; display:block; } span.beveled span { position:absolute; left:0; top:0; display:block; width:190px; height:190px; border:5px solid; border-color:#fff #000 #000 #fff; filter:alpha(opacity=40); opacity:0.4; } <span class="beveled"> <img src="stormtroopers.jpg" alt="A legion of Lego Stormtroopers, standing in formation." /> <span></span> </span> Further DevelopmentYou could take this further by using colorful borders for a gel-like effect, or even multiple staggered overlays to create effects that are more subtle or intricate.
But the basic idea is here, and I hope you find it useful. It’s certainly been great fun to play with!
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