Level Orange

When looking for work late last year, I recently got in touch with a former employer of mine, Bob Lamons, and we discussed building out a site for his new B2B marketing venture, Industribrand (as in “industry brand”). Now, I’d worked for Bob for nearly six years at his ad agency, Robert Lamons & Associates and when that operation closed its doors, I moved on to publishing for several years. Still, I jumped at the chance to both rebuild a working relationship with Bob as well as flex some more of my skills in web design. As I’m sure often happens in the design industry, I was once again working for a former employer, albeit in a slightly different capacity.

Back in 1998 or so, I’d built the RL&A site (ads2biz.com) entirely by hand, one page at a time. Eventually, I retooled the site using one of the early versions of Movable Type mostly out of a need to make adding and editing content a breeze. Similarly, the Industribrand site would need to be just as easy to use, while still being powerful and flexible. Enter WordPress.

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Great roundup of some of the most-watched designers in the web design community. Zeldman, Cederholm, Moll, Budd, Meyer…I’ve been personally following some of these folks for years, as they often have great insights and opinion on where web design and principles. If you do any work that’s even remotely design-related, you should read up on what these guys (no ladies?) are doing. LINK

It took a lot of work, and a couple of missteps, but the new Podtacular.com is now live!

Hosted by Foo Mo Jive, Podtacular started in July 2005 as an unofficial podcast discussing all things Halo 2, including game tips and strategies, interviews, custom gametypes and the Xbox Live community.

Having originally built the site on the e107 publishing platform, there were problems from the start, with everything from the templates and structure to the constantly-changing core (which is still in development). This caused a couple of nasty problems to show up in the course of developing the site, so I had to back out and look for an alternative. I just couldn’t risk building what I hope to be a great community site on a faulty foundation. I didn’t want it to fall apart at any given moment.

So I moved everything over to the CivicSpace platform, which runs on the Drupal “engine.” As it turns out, CivicSpace is built almost entirely around the idea of a community site. So it’s well equipped and well-developed for web standards and an organized site structure. And then there are all of the plugins, also called “modules,” that extend the CMS even further. The level of configuration within it all is staggering and at first, a little intimidating, but for standard users, I think it’ll be a comfortable fit.

So if you’re into Halo 2, Xbox games or just online gaming in general, check it out. I’m even scheduled to appear on the next podcast sometime soon!

With Web 2.0 being all the rage lately (and already inspiring a backlash of sorts), I’ve been slow to really take the time to see what it’s all about. I know it was sparked by some small companies taking some new approaches to how the web works–the most notable being companies like Google, Flickr, del.icio.us and even 37Signals–but I also know there’s more to it than that.

It seems to be more of a movement than a technological advance, but the darling of the moment is AJAX, or Asynchronous Javascript And XML. I know there’s some neat things AJAX can do in regards to the end user experience, and I also know that it’s been around for years, mostly under the guise of DHTML. And for that reason, I’m leery of taking advantage of it.

Until I found script.aculo.us, where Thomas Fuchs has compiled a number of recently developed scripts and techniques to handle the most common AJAX effects and functions into one downloadable and easy-to-use package. Seemed easy enough, so I took the bait and started playing around with it.

For starters, I wanted to rearrange my home page a bit, but wanted an easy way for visitors to find all of the information on the page without have to scroll around. So I wanted a button or link that would instantly send the user to the right part of the page (either top or bottom). Now, I’ve seen this done plenty of times, and have put together a couple of scripts to do it myself in the past, but I wanted to see if scriptaculous could do it for me. I looked through all of the functions, and there it was–”Effect.ScrollTo”. All I had to do was tell it which div to go to using the ID selectors and -presto!- there it is!

So now, maybe I’ll be able to implement some basic functions with relative ease, even though I don’t see any immediate need for anything else. Maybe it’s just about keeping up with what’s new, maybe it’s about needing to know what the future might hold, but I wanted to see what was up with all this AJAX business, even at a basic level.

What I don’t understand is all the rest of that fuss about Web 2.0.

With a recent visual upgrade and some heavy back-end improvements, the new, new Newtype USA site is alive and well. There were some kinks to iron out and still some pages to transition over and populate, but for the most part, people seem to like the new look and organization overall. It was another proud moment for me, being the sole individual behind putting it together. It’s definitely keeping me busy these days–staying on top of it all.

Then I received this e-mail:

>The print on your site is way too small and it is difficult to read. I have to copy and paste the words into a document inorder to get my way around the site. Could you please do something about that?

In all my work to make a flexible design that would render across almost all major browsers, all my work to stick to the strictest of specs and standards, I had managed to overlook an entire portion of the audience. I had made a giant assumption about our visitors and their accessibility needs and someone called me on it. The shame…

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After hitting some snags trying to get some sort of site management tool for work, I’ve now got some great stuff in the works. I’d already exhausted any possibilities of a well-designed, user-friendly ASP application and without a separate database, was getting to the point of just using a crude flatfile system. I know, I know, Movable Type (which powers this site) has a flatfile option, but it’s also very flexible and works as either a CGI or PHP application. Yet, for some reason, there was this unwritten rule that the site had to use ASP scripting only. I say “was” because once I asked about using a PHP application and had a new database set up, suddenly the gates were flung open.

Perfect. Now I needed to find a suitable application. Capable of handling several users, very platform-friendly, had an intuitive user experience and most of all, little or no cost. Man, did I not know how many choices there were. From the start, I decided to look at open source systems only. That would not only lock the cost at zero, but would also provide a vast support and development community. So with that in mind, I started doing some research.

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I have to admit, one of the things I had in mind when I signed on at my job was getting in on some web design action. It wasn’t exactly obvious how I’d be able to do that, but because I had experience in web design for several years, it was something I was interested in. When I found out that there was a separate team working on web development, I was a little disappointed, but figured that was all for the best. Good, let them handle it, I said. At least, that was my initial reaction.

Like most companies who operate under a parent entity, the site was being managed under an umbrella structure, meaning that one team handled design, development and maintenance of ALL corporate sites. Unfortunately for us, there was a time when priorities had shifted and the magazine dropped in both relevance and status within that structure. In turn (at least this is what I was told) each division was given back control of their respective web presence, in order to free up man-hours for other projects. As a result, the magazine’s site quickly grew stagnant. Because it relied on a database-like back end, it became a chore just to update content and almost impossible to get quirks and bugs stamped out.

That’s when, after several months of nudging, I just couldn’t help it anymore. One day, I simply asked, “why don’t we just do this ourselves?” and surprisingly, I didn’t meet with much resistance. Instead, I got the go-ahead to work up some ideas.

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Not like I’m some big honkin’ nerd or anything, but I’m finding the XHTML spec quite intriguing. Even though it’s supposed to be the new standard, replacing the ever-extending HTML, this is the first time I’ve bothered to check it out. So I took a closer look.

What I found was a bit of the old HTML with a saucy dash of the elusive XML. Ahh. Quite a fashionable markup language we have here! Never mind that it was originally recommended by the W3C back in January of 2000, it’s still brimming with possibilities.

Which led me to inspect attack22.com for simple W3C HTML 4.0 compliance. And guess what, I didn’t pass.

Oooohhhh! I can hear the black vans pulling up outside, filled with squads of men in SWAT gear coming to get me this very second!

Before they kick in the door, I suppose I’d better mention something.

Yes, I would like to comply with the XHTML 1.0 specification. I want to be validated.

Now, if only it weren’t such a big mystery as to where I start.

In looking at different design sites, looking for ideas and just to see what others are doing, I came across several sites that blatantly flaunt their “version” number, apparently touting how many iterations they’ve been through to get to the present state. But my first question is ‘when are these amateur web designers goint to learn that no one cares what version their website is currently at?’

Really. We don’t.

For internal or organizational purposes, I can understand. I even do it myself. But what’s the point in taking the time to pick a typeface, a color and a style to convey this completely useless bit of information to viewers? And how is it that there’s never version 2.2 or v3.6?

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