I have created some views to replicate these pages with more filtering options. View Bulk Operations does come with a sample view for content, but I found that this view didn’t contain the options I wanted. Each view comes with two pages: one to replace the default admin pages (admin/content/node, admin/content/comment, and admin/user/user). It would be nice if these could be the same page but you can’t have more than one URL for a page. These are in use on The Webmaster Forums. Some of the terminology might need to be adjusted for your site, particularly the label for the taxonomy filter (forums are taxonomy terms). Views Bulk Operations is used to allow operations to be run on multiple items at once.

Warning: These views have a lot of complicated filters that may not be suitable for some users. You may want to restrict this to advanced users only (although I’m not sure there would be a situation where a user would have the administer nodes permission but wouldn’t be sophisticated enough to work with this interface!)

Below are screenshots of the three views (click to enlarge) with links to download the views.

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.

The topic of SEO

Most of these spammy posts come in the SEO and Marketing forums. I suspect that many of these people work for those companies that send you unsolicited email telling you that they can get your site to the “top of Google”. Unfortunately, many unsuspecting website owners fall for that.

These people think that forum signatures are a good way to get backlinks, and they have a tiny bit of knowledge of SEO (seeing as how they work for an “SEO company”), so they post a bunch of crappy posts in our forum. Thus, our forum becomes filled with crappy SEO posts.

We don’t want to be an SEO forum!

We don’t! And yet, because we rank well for “Webmaster Forums”, this is what we have become. If given the choice, we wouldn’t call that. This is a legacy thing for us. This forum was started back in the 90′s. It was one of the first forums of it’s kind. In those days, SEO was only one of the many things as “webmaster” might do. In those days, web people weren’t nearly as specialized as we are now.

What I’d really like to do is ditch the Webmaster Forums domain and  merge everything into A Padded Cell. Then we might have a better chance of attracting the kind of members we want. The problem is that we’re currently first in Google UK for “webmaster forums” and second in Google Canada. How can you abandon a #1 ranking in Google?

Where do these people come from?

We have noticed that the majority of these spammy posts come from South- and South-East Asia. Normally I’m a big fan of diversity. It’s always been one of the strengths of our community. But this is starting to become a bit of an issue. Lately they’re even becoming more open about where they’re from. They used to say they were from the US or Britain, but now they’ll be honest (which I don’t mind, because lying about where they’re from really annoyed me).

Why is it an issue? Well, mainly because I think it can be off-putting to other members. They may think that everyone in our forum is from these regions and therefore they don’t fit in. These members don’t write English very well and their posts often don’t make sense. They also tend to use wording that would seem strange to native English speakers (e.g. calling other members “dear”). Add this to the fact that the actual content of these posts is not very strong.

All of this would be fine in smaller amounts, but when the majority of our posts have one or more of these issues it tends to lower the quality of the forum overall. If the quality of the post content was better none of this would be a problem.

Of course, I don’t mean to say that all members from South-east Asia are problems. They’re not.  We have some very good members from that part of the world. It just so happens that most of the spam comes from there too.

Do people even want to talk about design & development?

It seems that few people want to talk about anything other than SEO. I was wondering what it is about these topics that make them more popular than others. There are a few factors that could contribute to that:

• In design & development, forums aren’t that important. I imagine there are a lot of designers and developers who have never participated in a forum community. In SEO and Marketing, the opposite is true. Forums are an important part of the professional community, and there are a lot of them. In comparison, there are relatively few forums that focus more on design and/or development. Why is that? Do people just not want to talk about web design? I actually think that the SEO community overall is much stronger than the design and development communities (but that might be a topic for another post!).
• SEO is easy to talk about. It’s easy for people to have an opinion about simple questions like how to improve your site ranking (not that these opinions are necessarily good ones!). It’s also easy to articulate what these techniques are. How do you explain a process of problem solving in design or programming? How do you explain a design approach that is innate?
• Design & development questions often don’t prompt ongoing discussion. A question on SEO, such as “how do I get more traffic” can get a lot of responses over time. In contrast, design and development qustions are often very specific. This doesn’t line up in IE6. How do I fix this code? They don’t need answers from multiple people, let alone an ongoing discussion. Once the problem is solved the topic is over.

We are also targetting a more beginner level audience. These people don’t live and breathe web design like the professionals do. It might be a hobby, or a tiny part of their job. They might just be starting out in the profession. Engaging these users is tough. Currently I am reading the Art of Community by Jono Bacon and it’s giving me a lot of ideas.

The sentimental value

I met my husband on this forum. I have spent a tremendous amount of time over the years posting, deleting spam, and otherwise improving the place. This alone is the main reason why I keep doing this.

I have been on maternity leave since October so I’m not entirely sure of the reasons for this decision. I know that some people went for training on the Open Text system in November and found it to be very cumbersome and difficult to use (something I thought was evident from the beginning, to be honest!). I think there were some other issues as well but I don’t know too much.

Needless to say, I am thrilled!  There is a tiny bit more information on the Kitchener Waterloo Drupal User’s Group, as well as in the UW Daily Bulletin.

I will be looking at four major Canadian Olympics sites:

• The Official Vancouver 2010 site
• The CTV Olympics site (official broadcaster)
• The CBC Olympic site
• The Toronto Star Olympics site

For each site, I will look at the home page, the event schedule, and a sample sport page (Nordic Combined, since I always forget what that is), as well as a few other standout features or things I come across.All four sites feature similar basic layouts with grid-based design and horizontal navigation. They all feature news content, video and interactive features, sport and athlete profiles etc. Three of the four have chosen to use a large graphic background image.

The Good

The CBC Olympics website is my favourite of the four. I like the clean, bright layout. Their colour scheme ties in to both the Vancouver 2010 site (blue) and the team Canada colours (red). It’s a unique combination that really makes their site stand out. The ribbon motif in the background didn’t make much sense to me at first, but now that I look at it I can see the movement that is reminiscent of many winter sports (sledding, figure skating, downhill skiing).

Their home page has a similar layout to the others, and also includes lots of features, but unlike the competition they have done a good job of highlighting interesting features. There’s more differentiation between the different features which helps to lead your eye down the page and focus on their best features. They’ve also used some unobtrusive javascript to fit more content on the page and help you to navigate more conveniently.

Before the Games began they had a nice, simple schedule in table form (similar to the one on the official site). Now they’re showing a weird table with little squares for events and blue dots for medal events. Hello, confusing! Lesson: when displaying complex information, it’s usually best to keep it simple rather than attempting to come up with something clever that just doesn’t work.

On the individual sport pages, content can sometimes be lacking (which sort of makes sense since they aren’t an official broadcaster). The Nordic Combined page, for example, features a lot of content that isn’t specific to Nordic Combined at all. The menu for this individual section is further down the page and easy to miss, especially since it’s buried between unrelated content.

I’m having fun with a cool interactive feature showing the geographic distribution of medals over the years (and also by sport). It’s fun to see how things changed after the breakdown of the Soviet bloc. This is a great example of how to use Flash appropriately. Just do the interactive parts in Flash (what it’s good at, and HTML/CSS is currently not), while keeping the text content as HTML.

The Official Vancouver 2010 site is a close second for me so far. It’s more complex and some of the details haven’t been worked out as well as they could be. For example, they’ve taken care to fit the design into a 1024 window while adding interest at higher resolutions, but haven’t considered what happens to people who don’t maximize their windows, and therefore see a cut-off image on the right side. There’s a big hunk of white space in between the end of the content and the footer (every time I see that I want to get into the CSS and fix it!).

I also like what they did with the event schedule. Simple list of events by time, with an option to view by sport with a drop-down from the top. In previous years they usually had complicated tables with icons for which sport was happening on which day, and you had to click through to see which events were on at what time. This makes it much easier to see what’s happening (and print for reference).

The Nordic Combined page is similar to CBC’s, but with more content and an easier to find navigation menu. I enjoyed reading about the history of the sport. There’s even an interactive quiz to test your knowledge of the sport (love the Millionaire style cheats available!).

This site also has an interactive feature showing medal distribution over time. I like this one as well, although it feels a bit less responsive than CBC’s (this one is done in JavaFX, not Flash).

The Bad

The Toronto Star is sort of a third party to the Olympic Party – not an official broadcaster or local city paper. But of course, they have to get in on the party too, and  it’s not all that pretty. As usual with their sites, the Olympics site is complicated with small text and lots of (intrusive) ads. They have used the same colour scheme as the Official site, which shows a direct link to the main event.

Their schedule page is very simple, with just a list of events. It’s not bad, but it’s a bit harder to read and takes up a lot more space than the Official site’s schedule. They don’t seem to have a page for Nordic Combined, so I looked at the Cross Country page instead. The design isn’t much, and there’s not a lot of special features, but they do have very strong news coverage (appropriately enough!).

The Ugly

CTV is Canada’s official TV network for the Games (unfortunately outbid CBC for the next 2 Olympics.). Their site takes on a simlar form to the others – grid-based layout with lots of features on the home page. I find this one to be the most cluttered looking of the four. Their colour scheme doesn’t tie in to the Official 2010 colours, working with Canadian team colours instead.

Maybe it’s just me, but I don’t find the graphic design to be very attractive. Their sharp, icy motif is a harsh contrast with the bright, clean look of the Official site and CBC’s. They use a lot of gradients and drab grey. Take a look, for example, at the centre section of their home page with the Results Spotlight, Latest Photos, and Medal Table. They use the same design scheme for their television graphics, where they aren’t any more successful.

Someone also made the (really bad) decision to create a separate domain rather than putting the Olympics site on a subdomain or folder on their main site. All that link juice down the toilet.

Their schedule is a grid with grey backgrounds to represent events occurring on that day and gold circles to show medal events. There are two dimensions of information that people might want to see on a schedule: What’s happening on that particular day, and when events are scheduled for a particular sport. This schedule attempts to show both, but doesn’t do either particularly well. The official site chose to optimize for events having day by day, while allowing users to click through to the event pages for the individual event schedules. Lesson: if you can’t accomplish all your goals in one interface, it’s sometimes better to optimize for one goal, while providing another interface for other objectives.

The Nordic Combined page, like the rest of their site, is very complicated and graphically heavy. A lot of the content isn’t directly related to Nordic Combined, but there’s no graphical differentiation to tell you what belongs and what doesn’t. Sometimes it’s hard to tell if a block is related to the page topic or not.

Other examples?

Have you seen other examples of Olympic websites that you’d like to share? What are the media outlets in your country doing?

There is a lot more I could say about the four I’ve chosen to profile here, but I only have so much time to type these days with a four month old at home!

1. What is this?
2. What do they have here?
3. What can I do here?
4. Why should I be here – and not somewhere else?

The user needs to have some clue as to whether this page or website will give them what they want (have the information they need, the products they want to buy etc.). In that sense, what appears in the fold – whatever size that is for them – is crucially important.

You also need to make sure that it’s evident that there is more content further down to scroll to. I recently visited this page on the Exercise TV site (screenshot). On my screen the fold ends around Jillian’s mid-thigh. With the blue background, the text ending where it does, and the visual focus on the photo, it wasn’t apparent to me that there is more content further down. I actually didn’t realize it until I clicked on the link to browse videos and realized that it pointed further down on the same page. With widescreen monitors the scrollbar may be out of direct view, so conscious design is needed to tell the viewer that they should scroll to see more.

Via For a Beautiful Web, where Stephen Frein has a useful comment.

There is a reason why most websites have similar basic elements. It’s called usability. When users are trying to accomplish a task (find information, buy something etc.) they don’t need to figure out an entirely new navigation structure and page layout. They need sites to behave in relatively similar ways so they know what to expect and how to accomplish their tasks.

The Web can be a repetitive and boring place. Many Web sites look the same or are created based on the same basic principles.

That’s actually a good thing There is a time and a place for trying something new, and that’s valid, it’s just not something that’s appropriate for most websites.

So, the question is, what are the most innovative web designs of all time? I’ll have to give that some thought.

I did do my best to sell the benefits of Drupal to the committee, and to explain why the OpenText product (formerly called RedDot) was not a good solution (phrasing it politely). However, I’m not sure that, given the chance, “we” would have chosen Drupal anyway. Why? Here’s a few of the biggest objections given by others in the group:

1. Sever models – the other two systems under consideration used a “push” model where static pages would be published to outlying web servers. This was considered to be preferable to a centralized model where pages are served by a database. Why? Mainly because many units within the university really want to run their own web servers. They also liked that the main system was “behind the firewall” and therefore more secure. This issue was focused on by some people to the exclusion of any other factors (usability? functionality? extensibility? who cares?). A few people actually said that since these two systems used the same publishing model then they were “really the same”.
2. “It’s not enterprise” - I’m not sure what this is actually supposed to mean but it was a big problem for some people (and I’ve heard this in other higher ed circles as well). Maybe if it had a sticker price of half a million dollars and  obscenely complicated server requirements, then it would be “enterprise”??
3. Security – there are still many people out there who believe that open source must be insecure because it’s developed by “some guy in his basement.”

There might have been other issues, had we ever gotten around to actually testing Drupal against the other two systems. Drupal isn’t exactly known for its usability, but from what I saw from the others Drupal isn’t any worse and might actually be better. To be honest, our presentation from Acquia didn’t do a lot to make the benefits of Drupal more clear.

However, as Zeldman notes:

No hammer fits all nails, and no solution, however elegant, will work for every situation. But if we’re open minded, Andy’s proposal may work in more situations than we at first suspect.

Remember NS4?

This technique is very similar to what we used to do for Netscape 4 users when use of that browser started to tail off. We would serve our CSS using @import, knowing that Netscape would ignore that command and either get no CSS at all or a simpler stylesheet served with <link>.The Universal stylesheet for IE6 is a slight variation on the same technique.

As in the NS4 days, if and when to go this route depends on the situation. Of course you’re not going to do something like that if 30% of your visitors are using that browser. But what if it’s 6%? Or 4%? You wouldn’t choose this approach if branding an image were an important part of your site, but if the content is the focus (as Andy suggests), then maybe this is an appropriate option to consider.

Is IE6 worse than NS4?

Does anyone remember how much agony we went through in the last days of Netscape 4?  I’m starting to think that IE6 is dragging along longer than Netscape 4 did, and is harder to get rid of. With Netscape 4 there seemed to be fewer stubborn and pervasive obstacles to upgrading.

They at least need to know

I strongly believe that users of older browsers, where possible, should at least be informed that they are using an outdated browser. This situation is never going to change if users don’t even know that there’s a problem (since, you know, Microsoft is doing such a great job of explaining that). Even if their only recourse is to go to their IT department and complain.

This, again, is a matter of appropriateness. Of course I’m not going to put a message on the UW home page telling IE6 users to upgrade. But on the web development site? That would be appropriate.

I first read about this in James Kalbach’s Designing Web Navigation (p. 45) just last week. The point is that people have better experiences with visually attractive things, making them easier to use. Emotions are a central part of any user experience:

“When you felel good it is easier to make decisions, brainstorm, and be creative, for instance”

Makes sense, doesn’t it? If you’re in a good mood you’re a lot more forgiving. On the other hand, if you’re in a bad mood, you get frustrated more easily, give up faster, and generally have a hard time thinking rationally.

In the ALA article, author Stephen P. Anderson also points out that:

• products have personalities, which influences user perceptions
• visual design is used to evaluate credibility

Next you can apply this to a design project. How does your design make people feel? Is this in line with user expectations? I think we do this instinctively as designers but it’s useful to think about it deliberately. You can also think about how your design may affect different audiences in different ways. Some audiences have different ideas about what looks good and what would make them feel good about using something. Consider any OFAD types you know

Now, about the term “eye candy” – Anderson equates “eye candy” to aesthetics. I never interpreted the term that way. Who knows, maybe it’s being used in different context from what I’m used to in some other circles. To me it means visual emptiness. Flash intros. Animated graphics. Mystery meat navigation. Something the PHB wanted the designer to put there to “catch attention”, which becomes lame and annoying after a month or two. That’s eye candy. Momentarily tasty, no nutritional value.

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.