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Blogs ยป Archive for March, 2005
Another blog where you can blame the prospect
The mock-ups discussion in last two blog entries still leaves me dis-satisfied.
I have 1 non-profit and 9 ecommerce web sites going, and after looking at portfolios of hundreds of designers, still have found only 2-3 that get the job done for me.
Now imagine the plight of a business owner who isn’t even focused so much on the Web.
It is REALLY hard to find good designers, and here’s why:
1. Sites like eLance, as many of you noted, generally provide a long list of people with mediocre portfolios and general focus (”we do it all!”), and do not engender trust.
2. Doing a Google search for web designers/developers is a disaster for a prospect. Thousands of me-too firms come up, whether at the top of page one or the bottom of page 10. There is absolutely no way to know whom to contact.
3. While local firms might do well with word of mouth and community service, they rarely have portfolios that meet MY specific needs (”MY” meaning the business owner’s specific industry and likes/dislikes).
4. Designers and developers talk their language, not the business owner’s.
5. Based on many replies to previous blog entries, many (not all) designers and developers take a holier than …
PHP and Standards: arg_separator.output
PHP’s configuration directive arg_separator.output allows you to tell PHP how it should separate arguments in a URL and has a default value of ‘&’.
The directive affects all URLs that are generated or modified automatically by PHP. The only time this is likely to affect us is when we use PHP Session Handling along with session.use-trans-sid to auto-generate URLs with session IDs. So, if you don’t use this, the following problem may not affect you.
Theoretically, if your web application preferred separating arguments in a URL with another character, such as ‘;’, then you could tell PHP to use that character instead:
http://www.example.com/url?variable1=value1;variable2=value2
However, the following note in the PHP manual’s Session Handling section indicates a problem.
Note: The arg_separator.output php.ini directive allows to customize the argument seperator. For full XHTML conformance, specify & there.
This seems very strange. Firstly, the issue has nothing to do with XHTML conformance. A quick glace at the HTML 4.01 Specification, the HTML 3.2 Specification or even this Introduction to SGML upon which HTML is based should remind you that all occurences of ‘&’ must be escaped (for example, with &), regardless of the version of HTML …
Thunderbird Anti-Phishing Tools
It is probably safer to assume close to everyone reading this has received phishing email at some point, as have the great majority of your customers.
The Mozilla Foundation’s Thunderbird email client will now include scam detection capabilities. (Thanks Thomas Rutter for the tip off on this!) If the app thinks an email message is a possible scam message - it will notify the user with a visual queue. Similar to spam tools, it will also have a “not a scam” button to denote safe messages - for example notifications of online statements from financial institutions you work with.
Among its features, Thunderbird will reconcile the hostname shown in an href’s display link and the underlying destination URL — which is one of the primary methods for ‘phishing’ people into visiting sites that aren’t as they appear.
There is a final warning dialog if a user proceeds and clicks a link, and gives one last chance to cancel.
More information is available on Mozilla Bugzilla (including screenshots).
Not only can this serve as a time-saver for email-savvy folks like web professionals, but it also is another opportunity for friendly non-sales contact with your prospects and existing clients - and further introduction to open …
More on Internet Explorer 7.0
The rumours are starting to fly thick and fast about the upcoming IE7.0. Although Microsoft have only said that the new version of the browser will focus on security issues, the web development community has been hoping that MS will take the opportunity to improve some of the areas in which IE lags behind its competitors, such as CSS support and user interface. Although entirely unconfirmed, suggestions are starting to leak out from Microsoft partners who may be seeing early versions of the browser. Microsoft Watch write that IE7 will have tabs, International Domain Name support, and a built-in RSS aggregator. Moreover, it will be able to correctly display transparent PNGs. The big question for the web community, that of better support for CSS, remains rather up in the air; it looks like the IE team will improve CSS support but won’t at this stage commit to implementing the whole of the CSS standard.
While an improved Internet Explorer should be a cause for rejoicing, it doesn’t mean that the world suddenly becomes entirely rosy. Not every Internet Explorer user will upgrade to IE7, especially since the new version will only be available to Windows XP SP2 users. The …
Say Hi to Cambria
Welcome to Per’Font’ Match!
Our first contestant works for a large software company in Seattle, Washington. She’s a hardworking career girl who excels at word processing and web design, enjoys long paragraphs with friends and loves to curl up with a good book in her downtime. Say a big ‘Hi’ to… Cambria!
Yes, this is Cambria and we are told she will not only be included in the new Longhorn OS, but has also landed the plum job of being the default Microsoft Word font. Hopefully that will mean Mac Office will get her too.
Farewell poor Times New Roman. It was a blast.
And it doesn’t end there from a type perspective. As Anne Van Wagener tells us, she will be joined in Longhorn by her friends:
- Calibri - an easy-going but smart sans-serif
- Candara - a serious young san-serif with old fashioned values
- Consolas - a monospaced geekfont that cares
- Constantia - a charming, approachable serif that’s easy to like
- Corbel - an incisive, no-nonsense san-serif with a gentle side
They all look great. Nice work Microsoft! (you’re still not off the hook for the PNG thing though)
Of course, even when Longhorn is released it doesn’t change much in the short …
Conclusion — What actually happened to company offering mock ups
Thank you for the great posts to the last blog entry, about using mock ups as a marketing tool. The story has reached its conclusion, and this entry will tell you what finally happened with the eLance bidder who provided a mock up for me.
First, a couple of points of clarification based on some of the many posts to last blog:
1. I provided very detailed specifications to any designer who requested them, including complete copy, proposed navigation scheme, and details about look and feel I wanted to convey (which should also have been apparent in the copy). I definitely agree with all of you who wondered how anyone could provide a mock up without getting into a detailed discussion with client.
2. While this was a simple web site (10 pages and two forms emailable to me for manual processing) for a non-profit venture, on any web project I as a consumer separate the work of more complex undertakings into a few buckets: copy, graphic/web design, architecture, infrastructure, coding/development. I’ve found no firms that can do a great job on all of these elements, and tend to parse them out — especially copy, graphics, and the development/infrastructure/architecture aspects. Therefore, getting mockups …
Safari’s Debug Menu
For web developers on Mac OS X, there is a wonderful and powerful hidden tool in Safari that in part functions like the Firefox extension Web Developer. Though it does not have quite the same depth as Chris Pederick’s tool.
The Safari Debug menu can be activated with a simple command in OS X’s Terminal (/Applications/Utilities/Terminal.app). At the initial shell prompt typing ‘defaults write com.apple.Safari IncludeDebugMenu 1′ (with Safari closed) will add one additional menu item upon its next launch. By changing the 1 to a 0 the Debug menu can be turned back off.
The extra menu has several nice tools, most straightforward but still largely undocumented. These include a page load tester similar to what ab can do for performance testing Apache (could possibly be leveraging it), access to viewing a document’s architecture (tree views), User-Agent masquerading and JavaScript debugging.
There are more handy tidbits - for instance opening the same page in multiple other browsers installed on your Mac for preview tests via a single click within Safari, and some limited SSL debugging.
Finally - a nice little bookmark importer for Mozilla, IE and Netscape (sorely missing in Safari without the Debug menu on!) and the capability to export Safari …
SEMPO Elections - A Fresh Start?
SEMPO (the Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization) has successfully held their long-awaited elections. After more than a year of trying times for the organization, the recent election of a new board and officers represents a great opportunity for change at SEMPO.
SEMPO’s past difficulties are well described elsewhere, so I’ll just say that it was a real learning experience for the founders, who had no real experience in running a non-profit professional organization. Quite frankly, that inexperience showed in a lot of the group’s decisions and actions.
Today SEMPO has a chance for a fresh start. Day to day activities are now being handled by a management firm, which also facilitated the recent elections.
The new board members and officers are:
- Kevin Lee, Did-it.com - Chairperson
- Dana Todd, Sitelab - President
- John Sanchez, Zunch Communications - Vice President
- Jeffrey Pruitt, iCrossing - Secretary-Treasurer
- Ron Belanger, Carat Interactive
- Chris Churchill, Fathom Online
- Barbara Coll, Webmama.com
- Koichiro Fukasawa, Wasabi Communications
- Gordon Hotchkiss, Enquiro
- Mauro Lupi, Ad Maiora SpA
- Jessie Stricchiola, Alchemist Media
- Julienne Thompson, Advertising.com
- David Williams, 360i
I caught up with newly elected board member and Vice President of SEMPO, John Sanchez of Dallas-based Zunch Communications (he lives right up the road so it was a wee bit easier to get a quote), who had this …
DOM Layout Effects
For most of the past two years the CSS spec has been dissected, twisted, stretched and hammered. Although CSS probably still has a trick or two up it’s sleeve, I think it’s relatively safe to assume that if something hasn’t been accomplished with pure CSS yet, it probably can’t.
Of course, Stu Nicholls will inevitably prove you wrong there, but lets pretend he doesn’t exist for now.
So what are your options for now?
1- Forget it and wait for CSS3 to be widely adopted.
2- Use the DOM to bridge the gaps in CSS2
Although it’s natural to think of JavaScript as a tool for designing site interaction and behavior, don’t underestimate it’s ability to bridge the presentation gaps that CSS can’t.
Alessandro Fulciniti has a demonstrated a nifty example here. Like Simon’s rounded corners article from last year, this method takes clean HTML and ‘retro-fits’ the corners into the markup via the browser. The twist in Alessandro’s script is he doesn’t use images at all.
As you can see from this ‘zoomed-n-bordered’ view, he’s using stacked, tapering block elements (bold tags actually) to create the corner profile. If the script doesn’t run, the design renders quite effectively …
Open Source and Microsoft
I’ve been knee deep in Mono for the past month or so, and I’m very impressed with its features and compatibility with Microsoft’s version. I like the idea of my C# skills being transferrable to a whole new set of operating systems, but I’m still a bit uneasy about the combination of open source with Microsoft-based technologies. While C# and the CLI are now industry-accepted standards, other core-.NET technologies like ADO.NET and ASP.NET are not. Both ADO.NET and ASP.NET have been ported to Mono, but I wonder how long Microsoft will put up with their proprietary technologies being freely used on non-Windows systems where they get no monetary reward. Maybe the number of Mono installations will never reach critical mass so it won’t be a issue, but I wonder.
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