Archive for the ‘Web Culture’ Category
Aug
14
2011
at 12:54pm
In my last post I offered a critique of the (not-so) new University of Waterloo home page. The next question is, how do these things happen?
Before I get started, I’d like to be clear that the points offered up in this post are gross generalizations, and certainly wouldn’t apply to all universities. These are just some of the issues I experienced at Waterloo—there are others that I won’t go into. I’m sure people who work at UW or other universities can think of additional factors to add. These points are also referencing the home page, although most of the factors listed apply to the rest of the web space as well.
Those of you who are familiar with web design in higher ed have surely seen the infamous venn diagram cartoon from xkcd:
When this was originally posted I remember seeing some talk about “web managers” not understanding usability. At least in my experience (as a former university web manager), that’s not the case at all. There are several problems at the root of this: Read more…
Posted in Design, Usability, Web Culture | 2 Comments »
Apr
02
2011
at 9:09pm
I’ve always been a generalist at heart. It’s often hard for me to choose a favourite, whether it is a favourite colour, favourite school subject, favourite fitness activity, or favourite discipline in web design. And yet this sometimes become a problem. Can you become great at something if you don’t focus on it exclusively? Or is it enough to be good? Will someone pay you to be a generalist?
So how can I contribute? How can I combine my interests into a meaningful, fulfilling, successful career? Do I have to pick a speciality? Am I asking too much of myself? In web design we are frequently faced with the work of experts in our field. Is it unfair to compare ourselves to them? Surely, yet sometimes it’s hard not to. Read more…
Posted in Personal, Web Culture | 1 Comment »
Mar
27
2011
at 11:39am
You’ve seen those posts, right? Someone forwards you an email with a title like “You know you’re a child of the 80′s when…”. Well, here’s one for those of us who have been doing web design for more than a decade. You know you did web design in the 90′s when:
- You poured over pages of free clipart, looking for tiled backgrounds and horizontal rules
- You actually learned how to make an animated gif (and not just for ads!)
- You were thrilled to have a tool for making complex page layouts. And that tool was a table.
- You remember having to use spacer.gif’s to get your table widths right
- You checked Webmonkey for new articles every week
- <font> was your friend
- You have coded html in UPPER CASE (<BODY>, anyone?)
- You remember having only a vague understanding of who the W3C was
- Netscape 4 and IE 3 were your browsers of choice
- Your website directory consisted of a bunch of .html pages and an images folder
- You used Server Side Includes with a .shtml extension
- You displayed shiny “awards” graphics on your site
- You learned how to make 3D bevels and metallic effects in Photoshop
- You installed “CGI” scripts written in Perl
- You had to find out if your server supported PHP
- Your site had a visible counter displaying how many “hits” you got
- You put up “under construction” notices, and asked people to “come back soon!!!”
- Headers? Who ever uses those anyway?
- 10MB on a shared server was plenty of hosting space
- You actually had a chance of getting your first choice of domain name, even with a .com extension!
- Your site had a Guestbook
- You had free web space on Geocities, Xoom, or Tripod (bonus points if you used all three!)
- You had tons of webrings on the bottom of your home page
- You had to do rollovers with JavaScript
- You had to code the same thing twice for IE and Netscape (remember <body leftmargin=”0″ topmargin=”0″ marginwidth=”0″ marginheight=”0″>?)
- You submitted your site to the Yahoo web directory … and actually got in (for free)
Can you think of more?
Posted in Design, Web Culture | 5 Comments »
Jun
04
2010
at 12:21pm
Running a webmaster forum is a difficult thing to do. I’ve been running The Webmaster Forums for almost 5 years, and moderating for 6 years before that. It’s a part of me. The problem? We get a lot of spam. In fact, I spend at least half an hour every morning taking care of spam. The outright spam needs to be removed. Links pasted within posts need to be edited out. User IP’s need to be checked to make sure these spammers don’t have multiple accounts. Some users need to be sent a private message with a warning about breaking the rules. Our moderators spend time on this too. It’s endless.
This takes up time. Time I could be spending with more valuable contributions to the forum. I could write more valuable posts. I could add more functionality that would be helpful to users. I could write more blog posts. I could write more articles for A Padded Cell. I could clean my house. Read more…
Posted in General, Personal, Web Culture | 2 Comments »
Mar
09
2009
at 12:38pm
I just stumbled upon an article about the increasing obsolesence of Dreamweaver and tools like it. The point is that websites are becoming increasingly dynamic. Building static html pages with a tool like Dreamweaver just doesn’t cut it anymore.
In the relatively near future every website will be a dynamically-generated web application and all of today’s sites built on multiple static pages will be ripped out and replaced.
I was trying to explain this to people in a meeting a few weeks ago. Static files clearly can’t handle the demands of todays websites. Even attempting to build in your own functionality by coding your own php is fraught with problems. Why should you do it yourself when you could just use (WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, your CMS of choice)?
Will there become a time when nobody publishes static html files anymore? Will new designers jump right into WordPress instead of building static websites first? An intersting topic to ponder.
Posted in Web Culture, Wordpress | 20 Comments »
Nov
13
2007
at 2:03pm
Today I stopped by Amazon.com to do some pre-Chirstmas shopping and was greeted with this graphic:
Front and centre, just under the search box. Now, I don’t know if this is always there… for some reason I think it might be a standard, but the recent rise in the value of the Canadian dollar changes everything. As of this morning, the Canadian dollar is valued at almost $1.04 US ($1.0382 to be more precise). This means that online shopping is a lot more attractive than it used to be when our dollar was worth 80¢. We don’t want to go to Amazon.ca where our dollar is worth $1, we want to shop at Amazon.com where it’s worth $1.04 (or $1.06 as it was last week).
To add to that, book prices are stuck where they were months ago when the books were printed. This means that the price for most books is $2-$4 higher on the Canadian site, if not more (I think Amazon may have adjusted these prices for the dollar value already). Buy a few books and you’ve covered the $5 + tax Canada Customs charges at the border (don’t get me started on that!). Oh, and I think the limit to qualify for free shipping is lower on the US site.
Another problem, which always applies to Amazon, is that the US site has a much broader product range than the Canadian version does, plus all those affiliated sellers. I can get a lot of stuff on Amazon.com that isn’t available in Canada at all. That’s why I want to shop there now.
For anyone running a US eCommerce site, now is the time to optimize your site for Canadian shoppers. Do you ship to Canada? Are the rates reasonable? You could even put up a little Canadian flag to welcome your neighbours from the North 
Posted in General, Web Culture | 7 Comments »
