Jason Stanbery - Internet Junkie, Pop Culture Slave, Web Designer
Archive for May, 2008
Myspace - I officially quit you.
Thursday, May 22nd, 2008
Over the past 6 months, possibly longer, I have logged into myspace a handful of times. When I did, I got no enjoyment out of it. To be honest, having a myspace page has become somewhat of an embarrassment. There is really nothing cool about having one, and so today I took the steps to officially remove myself from myspace.
The internet has become a very social medium. The “web 2.0″ thing that you here so much about is simply a way of saying user generated content. Things like myspace, facebook, youtube, flickr, twitter, and the dozens of other social mediums out there are communities built around the users. This is great for the internet. It makes normal people active participants on the web, not just viewers - but people that can steer their community in a direction. So why would I want to quit myspace? Simple, it doesn’t make sense.
Myspace is a website that generates a lot of money for a really crusty old man that owns the major media corporation News Corp (think Fox). Granted the other social networks aren’t a whole lot better. They’re in it to make money as well, which means they’re probably praying some big company comes along to snatch them up. Its a business, and I understand that.
The problem with large social networks like myspace and facebook is that they cease being proactive. They offer a crappy service, people figure out its crappy, then they quit using it. There are smaller ones, like Virb that are pretty innovative. They offer superior design options, they can be fully customized with an easy to use interface or you have access to the style sheet if you know your CSS. You can display your tweets (twitter messages), display your RSS feed if you have a blog somewhere else, display your flickr photos, etc. Basically, they figured out that people are going to get tired of not having one place for everything. You can use Virb by itself if you don’t have those other services, but if you do, they all play very nicely together.
Basically I’m saying, Myspace - you’re dead to me. And if the people I know won’t use another social network then my social networking days are gone. Heck, I’m 30 years old, which means I’m pretty much one of the creepy old people anyway.
Tags: facebook, myspace, social networking, virb
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What is good design?
Sunday, May 18th, 2008
Unfortunately its impossible to say what good design is in terms of things like what colors are right, what resolution should you design for, etc. All I can say, is you have to design for your user. Designing and making websites can cause you to put blinders on. We are not typical web users. I know I can be on a website for ten times longer than the average user, and it’ll take minutes before I even know what the site is about because I’m too busy studying the site elements. I play with the super cool flash elements, I study the moving pieces, I appreciate the design for the art that it is. This is why I’m not a typical web user.
Users want their information, and they want it now. This means they don’t want to wait for a flash site to load, they don’t want to read large blocks of text, they don’t want to figure out how to use that super cool animated menu. They want navigation they understand, either vertical or horizontal isn’t as important as making the navigation easy to find and use.
Users want to know the important information without having to read your copy. We spend a lot of time getting copy, having it proofread, revised, revised again. Unfortunately, most users aren’t going to read it. Users want to see images, headlines, bulleted lists, bold and italics. These are things a user will read. With that said, don’t go over board. If everything is a headline, then everything will become normal copy to the user.
Your visitors are going to hate you because of your SEO writing. I know, what good is your information if you never get found, but what good is being found if your users are going to leave your site because it is written as if the target audience are robots - and using SEO writing means your target audience actually are robots. Search engines rank you by many things, especially inbound links and the words that are used to link to you. Your URL is very important, as is your page title. When it comes down to your paragraph text, the only thing less important are your alt tags. Face it, Google is smarter than you. That is why they assign page ranking the way that they do. The best thing you can do is write for your user.
Keep It Simple Stupid. We’ve all heard this phrase, but do you really practice it? Keeping it simple for your user, often keeps it simple for your developer (which quite possibly is you). This is what it really all comes down to. Your user isn’t necessarily stupid, or lazy, but they probably are busy. This pretty much just sums up everything else that I’ve said.
Your design should enhance your content, not over shadow it. If you decide you want to read more about effective design, head over to Smashing Magazine and check out their list of 10 Principles of Effective Design.
Tags: SEO is not your friend, web content, web design
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Comment your code.
Monday, May 12th, 2008
Commenting your code is something that you should just do. It will not only make it easier on anyone else who has to use it, it will make your life easier as well. You often have to go back and tweak things, whether on the page or in a style sheet so comments can really reduce the amount of time it takes to find what you need to tweak.
I’m certainly not the best example of a code commenting commando but I’m getting better. I always comment my CSS to label it in my style sheet, sectioning it off. I also always comment in my hex values for the colors I use in a site at the top of the style sheet. I also use indenting in my style sheet in order to make it easier to see the cascading elements.
The most important area of commenting though, at least it is to me, is in the XHTML or PHP document. When you’re dealing with a bunch of divs it makes sense to comment the closing tags so you know what you’re closing. This doesn’t only help later, but immediately. I try to use classes when I can for things like unordered lists for navigation , but its still nice to have a definitive comment that says — close main navigation –. This proves especially helpful when using includes because you’ll often find the opening tag for a div or class in one file, and the closing tag in another, especially when it comes to your wrapper div.
Tags: comments, CSS, xhtml
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