Just lately I have been playing around with an Idea. Its a simple one, but possibly a worth while endeavor. If you’ve ever worked in an agency environment you will know the frustrations that are suffered when you have an idea, or a view on a design. It may be something you have taken a lot of time and effort to achieve. Just to watch others higher up bastardize your work, turning it into something which you can no longer identify as yours, let alone take any pride in putting up your hand to say it’s yours.

Well I have come into this situation more than once. I think what hurts most is the lack of pride you can take in the work produced in the end, but more than any of that, is the feeling that you have been cheated out achieving something that could have been so much more than it was. If nothing more we as individuals, in and out of work, should strive to be more than we are, to better ourselves and our abilities. At least that is my outlook on life. So that’s why I have been mulling over this idea.

My Idea

Its pretty simple in conception but the basic premise is to take websites out there, they don’t have to be ones that you have worked on per say, and to create them the way they should, could and would look, if people would just leave the designer alone and do his/her job, without interruption. On the outlook this may seen like nothing more than an exercise in wasting time. But I believe the reward would be the work itself, and the merit you can take away from it. When I was at Uni we used to do something called a Photoshop challenge, my god I loved them, Duncan Smithson my lecturer at the time, would take time out of a class, to give us a short brief and an even shorter timescale to create anything from a business card to a PSD mock-up of a website front page. These were excellent exercises in brushing up on your skills, forcing you to think quickly about all aspects of design. I truly believe that I am a better designer because of it. Well in the same spirit I want to apply the Idea to this. Take a few potentially good websites, create a single html coded page with dead links as nothing more than a living example of how things could be.

How To Apply It

I haven’t decided how I’m going to produce this, But I think I will try to update the blog with new and examples and links. I think I’m going to call It “Conceptual” – if that doesn’t sound too cheesy, haven’t really decided yet, I would be interested to hear other peoples views/thoughts on this, or maybe someone can come up with a better name…

For a number of years now the web has been expanding into new horizons, with the progressive enhancements of web development as the driving force we are beginning to see more and more free open source methods to convey and display information. This goes beyong the new media hash and rehash so many of us are use to seeing, into a new dimension, not just of thought, but of being.

I have been thinking about this rather a lot just recently, mulling over the possibilities and implications of pursuing such courses. The big question that still hangs doubt in my mind, is why bother? do your family and friends really care what you are doing, maybe, maybe not, it depends on who you are and what you are doing I suppose.

This rise in whats become known as “life streams” (nothing to do the FFVII) has been ignited with inspiration from applications such as twitter and facebook, which push this prospect of a news feed of your life. What facebook began has now escalated into a snowball of twitter clients talking to RSS which amalgamate and parse RSS feeds, all of which leading to the possibility of having an ever updating feed, in which your actions become the catalyst for the events displayed. This is particularly interesting when you think of services such as last.fm and many others which offer you the potential to share your actions with others.

Perhaps then this is the natural progression from the blogging phenomenon. Maybe this should be seen as then natural first step, there are already pioneers who are pushing these ideas forward, making headway for the next big online social enterprise. In the meantime while I ponder over the possibilities here are a couple of good links to examples where these new waters are being tested.

Yale Lifestream project

Lifestream open source PHP script

Tumbling sox lifestream

FriendFeed lifestreaming solution

I have regrettably not been giving as much time to my blog as I would like just lately. Writing for tutorialblog.org, working full time as well as working on other private projects has taken all the spare time out of my life.

Content Manager

Most of my time at the moment when im not doing any of the above has been consumed in the latest project I am working on, its called Content Manager no prizes for guessing what it might be. Im rather proud of how its coming along, however its far from ready, when it is, im hoping to give it an open source release.

The basic Idea is to have a content management system which enables designers to focus on the design, knowing that a suitable back end which will be easy to skin, can be offered to clients.

Features

The content manager will feature statistics of web views, along with links to google analytics, web master tools and so on. There will also be full ecommerce support designed to be integrated with either Google checkout or Paypal. The products will allow you to create new product ranges, upload photos, create thumbnails as well as having full control over edit and delete options.

The primary feature of the content manager will be its ability to allow the owner of a website to quickly and easily update content and subversion old content. As well as all this the administrator will be able to create new users with access rights and be able to quickly and easily configure the websites settings.

The key focus to this project its the usability of the platform, which us being built using a database driven PHP code base, which im writing in OOP, I have chosen not to use a PHP framework, but am using the jQuery to manage front end scripting.

I hope to have more to show soon, so be sure to check back for more details.

Finally after a very long wait we are seeing web designers take the leap from supporting 600px width designs, to a much improved width of as much as 900px. This transition has been a long time comming, however finally we find ourselves in a new age of design enlightenment, and its about time too! To celebrate this, I have put together some great examples of websites which are leading the design revolution.

svenigson

svenigson

kompakt

kompakt

websiteburo

websiteburo

tnvacation

tnvacation

And that concludes just a small proportion of the many websites followiing this brave new trend

This is an Idea that I have heard bouncing around the web for a while now. I read a very insightful article on hacification which strengthened the argument considerably.

Good Reasoning

One of the best reasons for charging extra is to enable the client to recognize the time and effort that goes into fully browser complaint websites, it takes blood sweat and tears go get compatibility just right. So charging for this as an extra service is not entirely unreasonable, after all this comes separate to the time spent designing and developing a websites look and functionality.

The truth is there has never been a de jure standard for browsing the web, which in my own opinion is one the webs greatest downfalls. Instead there is too much choice on how to navigate your way through. This has lead to a grey area when talking about web design. The assumption that a website should be viewable through any means is a fallacy, but no one has ever acknowledged this properly. The W3C have introduced standards and done a lot of very good work, but it means nothing when designers are still expected to cater for decrepit platforms such as IE6 & 7, after all lets face it Microsoft just don’t get web, They should stick to what they know, which is desktop applications. By its very means Windows messenger, and Windows Hotmail, is a complete cop out, when Im looking at my emails on my OSX im not opening my messages with a different operating system, but anyway that’s besides the point.

Problems with the Plan

As with any great suggestion there are flaws. The main concern I have is how well the argument stands up in the real world. Consider that you were sold a car, but told you could only drive it on motorways, as the wheels may fall off if you drove it on any other roads. You wouldnt stand for it, so is it acceptable in web? This is something I have thought about an awful lot, but something Im still not sure I could actually do. Perhaps it depends on the client and their requirements, the scale of the project also make a great impact. I would be interested to know what others thoughts are on this topic!?

CSS Hacks have become something of an expectation in web design, with the mutitude of browsers your audience may choose to view your site through its important that your website looks its best whatever the platform. The statistics for browser usage portray 72% of the market is taken by ever faithful Internet Explorer users, followed by Firefox with 19% and Safari in 3rd place with 6%

Within these browsers you then need to contend with version control, in which you may see one version behave wildly different to its predicessor, no where is this more apprent than in IE6 – IE7. With all these considerations in mind, why not make life a little easier for yourself and try using the following CSS at the top of your stylesheet.

html, body, div, span, applet, object, iframe,
h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, p, blockquote, pre,
a, abbr, acronym, address, big, cite, code,
del, dfn, em, font, img, ins, kbd, q, s, samp,
small, strike, strong, sub, sup, tt, var,
b, u, i, center,
dl, dt, dd, ol, ul, li,
fieldset, form, label, legend,
table, caption, tbody, tfoot, thead, tr, th, td {
margin: 0;
padding: 0;
border: 0;
outline: 0;
font-size: 100%;
vertical-align: baseline;
background: transparent;
}
body {
line-height: 1;
}
ol, ul {
list-style: none;
}
blockquote, q {
quotes: none;
}
:focus {
outline: 0;
}
ins {
text-decoration: none;
}
del {
text-decoration: line-through;
}
table {
border-collapse: collapse;
border-spacing: 0;
}

What we are doing here is declaring some master styles which will overwitre any browser specific ones, take for example IE’s broken box model, this no longer becomes an issue meaning that you save yourself a lot of time, writting exemptions on id’s and classes. which means you can spend longer thinking abut how to make the site look great, and less time on how it will format in other browsers. Its as simple as that!