Matt / April 23, 2008, 9:42 am
From Khoi Vinh’s ongoing Q&A session:
Over the past two-plus years, as The Times newsroom has embraced blogging with tremendous alacrity, we’ve created over 150 blogs, and over a third of those remain active today.
The challenge is even more complex when you consider that, though each blog has its own needs, the vast majority must be based on a single template (within WordPress, our Web log publishing system) that manages all of the blogs together. As you can imagine, that requires that the template be very versatile and that our designers be very nimble.
So by virtue of the fact that we’re constantly launching new blogs, we’re also in a perpetual state of revision and refinement. We’re fine-tuning the typography, adding new features to the right-hand column, incorporating new kinds of media content into the articles, etc. All of which is work that may then be reflected back on the other blogs.
I find this really remarkable. I can’t help but wonder how difficult it was to get stakeholders to agree to the constraints of a single WordPress template. By standardizing the blog creation process, they now have an agile publishing system that imposes creative constraints but has been able to grow rapidly with nytimes.com.
Imagine being the guy in charge of maintaining these blogs though.
Matt / April 14, 2008, 12:23 pm
This year’s IA Summit just wrapped up in Miami and as usual there are several sets of slides that made me wish I had gone. Not surprisingly, I was drawn to Leah Buley’s presentation “How to be a UX team of one.”
A bunch of others look really interesting too, and relevant to others outside of the IA/UX practice:
Matt / March 21, 2008, 4:41 pm
This is a classic blog post I rediscovered today. Totally worth reading, even if you’ve seen it before and even if you’re not an information architect.
Users don’t much care “where they are” in the website. So-called “breadcrumb links,” which show the user the exact hierarchy of the website as they click further down, are a nice but mostly irrelevant technology. It’s not that users don’t understand the links; it’s that they don’t care.
Let me say it again, Max Bialystock-style:
USERS DON’T CARE WHERE THEY ARE IN THE WEBSITE.
I emphasize this because Web developers often waste time worring about “where content should live.” Should it be in section B? If so, we need to put big links from Section A to Section B. And then the secondary navigation will list Sections A through C, which are part of category D, because users might need to see the relationship between C, B, and the sub-tertiary wormhole that just opened in the site map!
Meanhwile, the user is on the site thinking, “Do they have it in size three?” and ignoring every element on the page that doesn’t appear to take them toward that goal. All the site-organization links, so carefully consistent with their display in other areas of the site… totally ignored by the user.
Matt / March 19, 2008, 11:59 am
Safari 3.1 (released yesterday) offers support for some new HTML & CSS features. There’s a demo on MacRumors.
One of the most exciting, I think, is downloadable font support — you can link to actual font files from the CSS instead of having to use the common “web safe” fonts.
All of these features are just eye candy until Firefox and IE support it, but it offers a little glimpse into the future of web design & development.
Matt / March 13, 2008, 8:11 am
An Opera developer writes up a comprehensive overview of the state of the mobile web design industry. Let me summarize, since it’s a long article:
- The iPhone is one slice of a much larger mobile market
- Mobile browsers are divided into two categories: full-featured (Opera Mobile and Safari) and constrained (WinWAP, Pocket IE, Blazer)
- Javascript support on mobile devices is uneven, always provide a fallback
- Design for 240 x 320; assume you’ll have a limited color palette to use and limited control over typography
- Plan for two distinct user experiences: Don’t ever assume that your web-based user experience will be the same on a mobile device
- Build one site that degrades well on mobile devices instead of building a second website just for mobile users
- Make use of the “handheld” media type for CSS
Matt / March 12, 2008, 1:44 pm
Via BusinessWeek. Many of Apple’s unique design methods are discussed in this article, but this one caught my eye:
Apple designers come up with 10 entirely different mock ups of any new feature. Not, Lopp said, “seven in order to make three look good”, which seems to be a fairly standard practice elsewhere. They’ll take ten, and give themselves room to design without restriction. Later they whittle that number to three, spend more months on those three and then finally end up with one strong decision.
10!
Matt / March 10, 2008, 11:27 am
They seem pretty impressed:
Apples sniffed out an industry that was divided into two disfunctional factions. The carriers, who are making the exact same strategic mistakes they made as long distance providers 20 years ago, and hardware manufacturers – also repeating old mistakes. The carriers are still caught up in creating barriers for consumers to maximize profit. Hand set makers are driving with technology first, the user second.
The iPhone is fundamentally changing the functional, developmental, and the business landscape of the mobile phone industry.
Matt / February 29, 2008, 10:05 am
OK, this is a pretty boring tip but it’s saves me a few minutes of tracking down URLs every time I want to compare something across several websites.
I use the “Bookmark All Tabs” functionality in Firefox to save the state of a competitive audit. This allows me to return to it later (or after Firefox crashes) by using “Open All in Tabs,” which loads all competitors’ websites at once.
Here’s how to do it:
- Open a new window in Firefox, create a new tab for each competitor you’re examining
- Go to
Bookmarks > Bookmark All Tabs... and save the set of tabs
- When you need to re-open a competitive audit, navigate through the Bookmarks menu to your saved tabs and select
Open All in Tabs
- Happily resume auditing
This method has the added benefit of recording for posterity the sites you audited for a project.
Matt / February 5, 2008, 5:40 pm
websitegrader.com
I haven’t used it enough to be sure whether I trust the numbers, but it’s the first site I’ve seen that tries to distill SEO down to a single number. It’s worth checking out.
