01/2008 Article Archive

  • January 30, 2008 in Design Inspiration

    Warning! BloggingZoom May Cause Seizures

    I was bouncing around my favorite social news sites in an early Monday morning stupor, when I discovered that BloggingZoom.com had released a redesign over the weekend. For a few seconds, I squinted my eyes at the at the glaring screen wondering if I had mistyped the url. Now I just wish someone had warned me about the celebration--the new BloggingZoom slapped me in the face and put a sparkler in my hand. Its minimalistic design had been shucked overnight and replaced with something from the high-energy, patriotic, art-deco aisle (if such and aisle exists). Upon closer scrutiny, though, I discovered that not all of the changes were unhelpful or inappropriate--time to get out the scalpel and start dissecting.

  • January 28, 2008 in Business & Process

    How Much is Too Much? A Guide to Client Control Over Website Content

    As web designers, we know the essential ingredients to website success. We spend hours every week blogging, networking, and studying keywords to produce our income. But our clients aren't always--in fact almost never--where we are when it comes engaging the online world. It's our tendency, though, to build sites for them as if they were. So which client needs the blog/product catalog/cms site and which one needs the hands-off site? We need a grid for determining the right grade website to build for each client. Here are some tips that have helped me develop my grid.

  • January 25, 2008 in Friday Blog Clips

    5 for Friday | The Week's Best Blogs (1/25/08 Edition)

    A lot is happening in the world of web design and, of course, the blogosphere always manages to capture the essence of change. This week Yahoo! integrated its search with del.icio.us social bookmarking (Web Worker Daily) and we were introduced to We7 as it raised $6 million to further develop it's DRM-free MP3 download site (Read/Write Web). Also, Veerle's Blog is back again with a stunning Photoshop tutorial.

    • 4 Comments
    • 1635 Views
  • January 23, 2008 in Design Tips & Tutorials

    Photoshop Tutorial: Quick Glass Buttons for the Web Designer

    For a clean, impressive looking button set that doesn't take up a bunch of design time, glass buttons are the way to go. And slapping together cool glass buttons like the ones on apple.com is extremely simple in Photoshop. I've been using this process for several years now and I know web designers will find it helpful. It's essentially three steps and I found that after I perfected the technique, I could fly through it in a matter of seconds.

    • 82 Comments
    • 50146 Views
  • January 21, 2008 in Web Design Culture

    9 Web Design No Nos for the Newbie

    I admit I've committed just about every crime against web design on this list. That's probably why it flowed so smoothly from my mind. They are all easily avoidable sins that, if transgressed, will cost a web designer big. So if you want to avoid humiliating yourself in front of clients and burning unnecessary midnight oil, take heed. It will save you a lot of anguish to learn from my mistakes instead of your own.

    • 77 Comments
    • 42276 Views
  • January 18, 2008 in Friday Blog Clips

    5 for Friday | The Week's Best Blogs (1/18/08 Edition)

    From pointers about relieving eye strain (Web Worker Daily) to tips about what should appear above the fold on a blog (Vandelay Website Design), practical advice for the web designer seemed to be the theme in the blogosphere this week. Smashing Magazine also ran a great article on the development of infographics that I'm sure will inspire you to spice up your graphs and charts. TutorialBlog makes it's debut this week as a companion tutorial post to Smashing Magazine's infographics article. Also, I would like to give a special welcome to Veerle's Blog.

    • 0 Comments
    • 1448 Views
  • January 16, 2008 in Product Reviews

    Turn the Web Into a Shareable Notepad with Diigo

    Back in July I wrote an article called "The 'MyStickies' Firefox Extension is an Excellent Collaboration Tool". MyStickies allows you to paste virtual sticky notes on websites and then share them with others. It's a simple concept but in the proceeding months I ditched Basecamp (no offense Jason Fried--I love your stuff) and began using MyStickies exclusively to collaborate on web projects. MyStickies doesn't do everything Basecamp does. But what it does, it does well. MyStickies was easily my favorite Firefox extension, that is, until I found Diigo "Social Annotation".

    • 4 Comments
    • 2271 Views
  • January 14, 2008 in Design Inspiration

    Breaking the Rules to Create a Talk Worthy Web Site

    In the spring 2005 I decided that having a talk worthy website is a critical advantage for an independent web designer. That realization prompted me to build the latest iteration of Liquid Design Media--the web site for my design studio. All the top search engine marketing and usability experts would disagree with almost every decision I made in building that site. I had a splash page, I used Flash, and the layout was abnormal. But I didn't design it to impress SEO and usability experts. I designed it so that someone looking for a web designer in my town would see it and say, "Wow...", and the competiion would fade into the background.

    • 6 Comments
    • 2314 Views
  • January 11, 2008 in Friday Blog Clips

    5 for Friday | The Week's Best Blogs (1/11/08 Edition)

    This week's list features quite a diverse set of articles, ranging from practical code snippets to online social networking trends. I thought Logic+Emotion's post about "infinite touch points" was especially insightful. It raises some interesting questions about the future of company/client communication. Also, Small Farm Design makes it's debut on the 5 for Friday list with a solid guide to usability basics.

    • 1 Comments
    • 1346 Views
  • January 9, 2008 in Design Tips & Tutorials

    Two Column CSS Layout: The Absolute Basics

    This tutorial is for the designer who wants to get acquainted with the basics of CSS layout. There are a lot of articles floating around with advanced CSS tips and tricks but there seems to be a gaping hole where the basic tutorials should be. An article like this would have been tremendously helpful to me when I first started into CSS layouts. If you're about to to take the plunge I'm sure this will be helpful for you.

    • 53 Comments
    • 178866 Views
  • January 7, 2008 in Product Reviews

    Web Browser Review: Flock 1.0 "The Social Browser"

    I've been a fan of the Flock browser for quite awhile now. But when version 1.0 was release on November 5th, I put off the upgrade. I've never been good about paying attention to upgrade dialog boxes. Last week I finally dove in. I have to say that my expectations have been exceeded. In case you've never used Flock, it's a fairly new browser based on Mozilla's browser technology...

    • 1 Comments
    • 3573 Views
  • January 4, 2008 in Friday Blog Clips

    5 for Friday | The Week's Best Blogs (1/4/08 Edition)

    I'm limiting the 2008 prediction articles this week to one (a humorous bit from Dot Sauce). The daily influx of these articles is waning so I had to throw one more in before they disappear altogether. I have to point to Web Worker Daily for the most interesting article this week. Their "6 Secrets to Running a Virtual Company" is a fascinating look at a company that's pioneering a better way to do business.

    • 6 Comments
    • 1564 Views
  • January 2, 2008 in Web Design Culture

    The Law of Evolution: Silencing Dissension by Redefining Science

    Clive Thompson contributed an article entitled A War of Words to the November 2007 issue of Wired Magazine. The tag line on the article was "Science will triumph only when theory becomes law". The gist of the article was that the theory of evolution has become so overwhelmingly confirmed by scientific evidence that it should now be referred to as the "law of evolution". This move, in his opinion, will finally suppress all the dissidents by placing them in a position where they will "sound insane" for questioning a proven scientific law. I take issue with Clive's proposal, and I could write a whole book about why. But for now I will try to give a quick overview and hit the high points.

    • 41 Comments
    • 2716 Views