Safari browser for Windows

One of the problems that any Windows-based web designer faces is how to test any newly created website on an ding (i) the use of cross browser testing websites, for example ; (ii) asking your Apple Mac mates to look at the website; and (iii) ignore the issue if only a small % of your website visitors use Mac/Safari.

You could also take the view that testing in a web standards-based browser like will identify any significant problems...and, as a result, another web standards-based browser like Safari should be fine. I think I have used all these options at various stages!

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SEO Centric Web Design

Often, web design theory has got it backwards.

A web site is often conceived as an entity which reflects the company who publishes the web site. A mission statement, given form. The reality is that people don’t care about mission statements, they care about seeing their own reflection. Or “it’s not about you, it’s about me”.

In no environment is this more true than on the web. The web is a two way communication medium, and the control of that communication, unlike, say, a film, rests not with the director, but with the user. The back button is only ever a click away.

For this reason, web design that places too much emphasis on what the publisher wants to say is doomed to irrelevance. The publisher does not have the upper hand when it comes to controlling the flow of web communication, yet a lot of web design theory assumes this as a given, mostly because web design is based on print publishing.

What are the most successful computer applications? Email. Word processing. Spreadsheets, Games. What are the most successful web sites? Amazon, Ebay, Google, MySpace. The history of computing is all about user-centric empowerment.

The way to do web design is to base design around users, specifically their wants and desires. People’s wants and desires should drive the design process, and structures imposed for other reasons will be less successful. This goes beyond usability. Web design should be, fundamentally, about listening to and addressing people’s problems.

This is where SEO-centric web design comes in.

As many SEOs know, people are broadcasting their needs and problems. Every second. They are using keyword queries in search engines to tell the search engine what they need. We can “listen” to these needs by using keyword research tools.

Once we discover the language people are using to describe their needs, we can then build pages, architectures and copy, using their language , and addressing their problems, thereby creating a website that is an accurate reflection of the people who will use the site.

For example, a search engine doesn’t see hierarchy, and most users don’t care about it. Every page is effectively a “home page”. Once people land on a page, they are at the start of the funnel which should quickly and effortlessly lead to desired action, which is the point at which you meet their needs. “Desired action” is often defined in terms of the desires of the publisher, but it’s even more useful to view it in terms of the desires of the visitor.

At this point, some readers will surely be thinking “but people don’t come to my site via search engines”. It doesn’t matter. The site should address people’s problems, and search engines reveal the language people use to do define and frame their problems. Web designers should not ignore this valuable information. Rather, this information should be integrated into the design process.

It is a Google centric web. Google achieved this feat by placing the user first.

SEO should be at the heart of the design process, not something bolted on at the end.

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The CSS working group is irrelevant

Back in March, Google hosted the CSS working group for a three day meeting.

At the time, we were just starting with the HTML working group, and the openness of the WHATWG over the past few years was just starting to be adopted by the HTML working group, after several months of pushing for it in the W3C (mostly in secret, though my own posts on the matter were all public, as were a few others).

One of the things I brought up in the CSS face-to-face meeting was the problem of the CSS working group not being open. Many of the members of the CSS working group have a mentality that view the Web community (such as those who e-mail the www-style mailing list) as a resource, not as potentially equal members of the community. Of the forty or so members of the working group (those subscribed to the secret internal mailing list), only a dozen subscribe to the public list. This actually makes it harder for members of the group to try to be more open — when someone posts a proposal to the public list, there's a good chance that the majority of the members of the working group will miss it. During the meeting, I opined that if the group continued along in this direction, the group ran the risk of becoming irrelevant; two of the other members suggested that the group was already irrelevant. Sadly we were in the minority.

The CSS working group right now is chronically dysfunctional, as most close observers have noticed.

A great example of this is the difference in how the WHATWG got a blog and how the CSS working group set one up. In the WHATWG, the idea was floated for a while, and then one day someone volunteered to run it, and the blog was up and running within hours. Anyone (literally anyone) can post to the WHATWG blog (there's a moderation step that we added to deal with the spammers, but all it takes now is to get onto IRC and ask for the post you wrote to be published). The CSS working group, on the other hand, has been discussing how to set up a blog, and what the first entry should say, and what tool to use, for over two months! Nearly every phone call (the group has weekly teleconferences) for the past nine weeks has had the blog discussed at some point.

The blog was finally made available last week. To post, you have to be a group member. The first post can be summarised as follows: the CSS working group members don't want to bother going out of their way to get feedback on their specs; instead, people should post their comments on CSS to the public CSS mailing list (despite the fact that most CSS working group members aren't subscribed to this list). The blog post then goes on to apologise for the blog's existence, and claims that the blog's aim is to reach the people who won't subscribe to the public mailing list (the working group itself, maybe?). The post doesn't make it clear how the blog is expected to reach this wider audience, since the blog has no comment feature.

Another example of the problems of the CSS group is visible on the W3C's Technical Reports page. The group's primary deliverables are specifications. The last candidate recommendation published by the group was published in 2004. That was the Basic UI module, which was Tantek's baby (he has since left the group). Meanwhile, drafts like the Backgrounds and Borders draft, which has had big parts implemented by Safari for months, and small parts implemented by Mozilla for years, have iterated several times but make no public process (the backgrounds and borders draft was published in 2005, but the internal draft was last modified in February of this year).

Meanwhile, CSS2.1, the working group's most important deliverable, keeps getting tied up, with the group discussing irrelevant details and some members repeatedly reopening old resolved issues. The W3C process doesn't help much here either; the group actually tried taking CSS 2.1 to Candidate Recommendation stage recently, but was blocked by the W3C management over an issue which was already present in CSS2. (In all fairness to Tim, the issue he raised is one which was already raised by several other people, but which the group had dismissed. I actually agree with him that it should be resolved. The group has since resolved to change the spec in a way that continues to leave the issue undefined, but at least it no longer contradicts what Web browsers do.)

The group is also supposed to work on test suites. I had volunteered to work on the CSS 2.1 test suite, but due to lack of time, I bailed on that last year (Google mainly employs me to work on HTML5; any test work that I do is done in my free time, which is mostly spent near aquariums now). Since then basically nothing has happened.

Being public would expose a lot of these problems, forcing the working group to act more responsibly. It would also allow people to contribute — as specification editors, as test suite editors, as reviewers, as community leaders, and in other roles.

But to be honest, the problems go even further than what I've described above.

The CSS specs show their age; they come from a time where specifications were much vaguer than those of the modern day. Someone really needs to do to CSS what the WHATWG has been doing to HTML, defining everything in detail, explicitly, with strict and clear normative conformance criteria, taking implementations into account, defining things like quirks mode. (The WHATWG community refers to such a hypothetical project as "CSS 5", as a reference to the way the current WHATWG specs define HTML5, XHTML5, and DOM5 HTML.)

The CSS working group also doesn't really have the nimbleness needed to respond to threats to the Web platform like Silverlight. We need things like flowing-to-shapes, automatic declarative transition animations, gradients, filters, styling of form controls, and so on. (The WHATWG is already handling some related, non-presentational, things, like client-side SQL databases, video, and rich controls.) We need these things this year, in enough detail that they can be implemented. An open group can iterate much faster than a closed group. With an open group we can get test implementations, feedback, tests, and discussion straight away, instead of waiting months and then pulling back the curtain and presenting a fait accompli, at which points comments are perceived more as a pain than a help.

One way to address this would be for the WHATWG to start a "subproject" to address CSS, while we wait for the W3C CSS group to learn from the W3C HTML group and become open. The biggest problem would be finding editors who would be willing and capable of doing the incredible work of rewriting CSS from scratch.

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Interesting: Apple’s Website Redesign

I actually found the various design upgrades to Apple’s website as interesting as the WWDC Keynote. Someone’s been hard at work over there.

One of the slickest items is how the search bar in the upper right corner behaves much like OS X’s Spotlight. It’s also live updating, so as you type strings in the field, the results change in a drop down, complete with thumbnail images.

Several pages have a static image, horizontal scroll treatment, kind of like Cover Flow but without all the crazy animations. It does present the subjects covered in the page in a nice visual manner. Note the slight transparent reflection, as if the products were photographed on a glass table.

The sidebars are made up of collapsing areas to minimize the amount of information on the page. A click has the titles slide away to reveal the contents. Nice idea, and the animation adds a touch of class.

Clicking on thumbnails brings up a larger image, not unlike the JavaScript “Lightbox” plugin used on many sites. But what’s really slick is the large image size takes your browser window size is taken into account. There’s also a diffuse shadow around the large image, really making it seem like it’s hovering over the page.

All in all, cool stuff, and possibly an even better redesign than the other Web 2.0 ones I’ve seen recently. I might actually say Safari wasn’t the only thing Apple updated to 3.0.

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authorUrl : http://www.webomatica.com/wordpress/2007/06/12/interesting-apples-website-redesign/
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SEO - Should search engines matter in your campaign?

Today, I had a small epiphany related to SEO/SEM/Internet Marketing. Whatever you call ithigh as possible in the SERPs. The theory is a little offbeat but please bear with me. I’m sure many SEO purists will flame this, but hey, it’s only a theory. (I’ll call it SEO from here-on in), I mean in terms of getting as

The Theory

OK, here goes. When going about your next SEO campaign do something radical. Imagine, if you will, that Search Engines don’t exist. Just think of your Users’ experiences. Bizarre and suicidal are words which may be in your mind at this moment. Take the following statements into account, though.

The Search Engine’s primary function is to serve useful and relevant results to the user. The results that deliver satisfaction.

The website in question has a similar primary function: To give the User the information they are seeking. To satisfy the user.

These two statements are very similar, showing that the Search Engine and the User have similar goals. In essence, the Search engine is trying to deliver usable websites to the User. Anything else is simply wasted space. So wouldn’t it be interesting if Search Engines jiggled their algorithm and highly weighted usability/satisfaction.

Doesn’t SEO Cloud This?

So, back to SEO. With a highly demanding SEO campaign it is very easy to slip into the mentality of tailoring the website for Search Engines. Biasing the website a lot towards Search Engines will essentially mean that you are driving a wedge between the two statements above. All the hard work you think you are doing could be putting a strain on the User’s satisfaction. A loss of site satisfaction and who knows, a loss in SERPs placements.

But Search Engines don’t really detect usability at the moment

OK, this is up for debate. But I believe that Search Engines place most of their efforts into ranking websites based upon statistics - essentially their algorithm. I cannot see a way (besides mass user testing and feedback - costly) that the Search Engine giants can measure Usability and Satisfaction at this time. (Any ideas on this are more than welcome.)

So you could say that at this time, the theory doesn’t lend any solutions to the SEO company.

So how could we use this theory today then?

Using similar principles to the above and a fresh mentality, one could use the following questions to improve SEO and usability at the same time.

Is the new feature/code/idea beneficial for the user?

Will it help my SEO campaign?

If the answer to (1) is No, then go onto something else. If it’s Yes for (1) and (2), get it going!

Think of the effects

OK, not all SEO companies think solely about a website in terms of SEO. It would be farcical to claim this. The good companies focus on SEO but take into account the fact that websites cannot be over-optimised and the experience cannot be made poorer to accommodate SEO.

But imagine if all websites were made using the theory of usable sites encourage SEO instead of Let’s SEO it with regards to nothing else. Websites, and the Internet as a whole, would fast become a more enjoyable, satisfying experience regardless of whether it helped in the SERPs. Only good can come out of it.

And over to you

I’d really love to hear your thoughts on the above. Do you agree with the ideas put forward? Is this merely a hypothetical world?

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Top-down web product design

One thing I’ve explored often is how many web-based applications fail because of a lack of proper planning. One thing that I haven’t stressed enough though, is that proper planning doesn’t always mean spending months on end thinking about every single detail, but actually thinking about things in the right order.

Traditional feature-centric design

Usually developers start planning applications by thinking of everything they want it to do - and let’s face it, it’s pretty easy to get excited: since you’re getting some functionality in, you might as well do all the other hundred cool things too, right? Well, wrong.

Getting excited is great, but it may just as well hinder the application development process. Focus slips, pretty soon you’re trying to solve all the world’s problems. You may have heard of scope creep - this is just the same, but it’s your fault, and is definitely avoidable.

Top-down product design

The solution is actually quite easy although it may seem odd if you haven’t done it before: design interface first, then underlying code. Result: no functional slippery slope - you know exactly what you need to build to accommodate the UI functionality. As a side benefit, you get to have something you can experiment with as a prototype sooner, which means you can get more input sooner and iterate over it.

Give it a try on your next project - your developers will love knowing exactly what they need to build, and your designers will love not having to design that new page for the brand new functionality that just crossed your mind.

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authorUrl : http://blog.webreakstuff.com/2007/06/top-down-web-apps/
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Web Design Workflow and Process Comparison

This blog is intended as a resource for professionals that are responsible for the long-term planning of a website (How to find out if you a at your company). While not a Web Design blog, web strategists need to make decisions, dictate budget, or approve web design projects. A client recently asked me for some resources for Web redesign for their website, well actually, they wanted to know of some firms that do this, I have started a voluntary list, but realize there’s quite a few steps that occur before and after dealing with a web design services company.

A Comparison of various Web Design Processes:
It’s interesting to note the differences in Web Design process (which is arguably different from from a variety of different industries and focuses.

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authorUrl : http://www.web-strategist.com/blog/2007/03/19/web-design-and-worflow-process-comparison/
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