TheJoey.Net

Over the summer I did a good amount of web design. I have been developing websites for almost 7 years now and have been inventing and reinventing my process as I’ve gotten older, more mature, and a better developer. This summer I got to evaluate my process to see what I should change about it- how I can make it better. I’ve come up with a five step process to take me from start to finish. Number one, Planning, is by far the most important part.

A problem I often run into is that user requirements, what a client defines as necessary for their website, change a lot. Recently one client I was working with changed the entire scope of the site, changing the necessary information being posted on it and thus changing just about everything about the site. That is why it is critical to nail down the details as much as possible before any coding starts. Sit down with your client, face-to-face when possible, and ask them to describe in as much detail as possible what they want their website to accomplish. Take down notes and write any of your questions or thoughts down. Then try to formulate something for them. This doesn’t have to be on the spot, and probably shouldn’t be. Schedule a follow-up meeting to make sure you interpreted what the client said correctly.

At the follow-up meeting, propose something. Most clients will not be computer savvy and will rely on your input. Don’t be afraid to make suggestions as to what you think will work or more importantly, what won’t. They see you as the expert (because you are) and the input is usually welcomed and valued. It’s also important at this follow-up to make any final pre-development changes and tie up lose ends. Add the proposed website/requirements to a contract and both of you sign it and initial each page.

Once this happens, and you have requirements nailed down and decided on, it’s time to move to part II- the mock up.

posted on September 1st, 2007 in Computer Stuff, Design| No Comments »

A few weeks ago CNN launched the redesign of their site, and in my opinion they really nailed it. With a cleaner design and new up-to-date features, the new CNN is really a leader in the major news industry websites.

Design: Looking at the old design, You can tell the new CNN is much much cleaner and more organized. With a full width header and fixed width content, everything looks more spread out and less crammed. The user is not overwhelmed by the massive amount of content CNN has to offer. They also decided to tone up their color scheme a little, going with more consistent reds, whites and lighter blues, like teal. This makes the site conform better than their previous design. Finally, a quick look at their source will reveal significantly less tables in the new design. This puts them way ahead of other major media sites.

New Features: I feel the best part of CNN’s redesign is the fact that their new features are more user oriented. They offer a great number of videos, blogs, podcasts, polls, RSS Feeds, hot topics and even comments to allow the user to make the CNN experience their own, which is a huge plus. My favorite new feature, however, is the “Local” box on the homepage.

The CNN Local box gives you weather reports and headlines from whatever zip code you decide to put it, and I find that awesome. Instead of having to navigate away from CNN, I can get all the news in one place. It also pulls from a number of local news sources for your area, which almost serves as an RSS feed for your zip code.

Over all, CNN’s new design is pretty nice. While they could have gone totally tableless, I think the new features and mostly tableless design puts them way ahead of their competitors. The new website keeps me coming back even if their brand of news isn’t mine.

posted on July 20th, 2007 in Design, Websites| No Comments »

As a web developer, I feel I know a little bit about design and functionality on a website. Lately I have been noticing my use of a website depends heavily on design and functionality, as I’m sure it does for most people whether they realize it or not. Take, for instance, how I get my news online.

Here are screen shots of both CNN and Fox News. Click the images to go to the sites. While Fox News is more my brand of news (surprise surprise), I find myself going to CNN more often. This is because I feel CNN has a nicer, cleaner looking site. CNN’s logo blends nicely with the rest of the banner, unlike Fox’s, which just looks like it’s thrown there. There isn’t too much going on ‘above the fold’ for CNN. With Fox, it’s a different story. For example, Fox offers 27 links in it’s main navigation. CNN offers 20 (which was actually more than I thought). CNN’s navigation is also contained to one, solitary line. Fox has theirs on two lines, each a different shade of blue. Below the fold on Fox is even worse.

Where CNN offers more stories organized in a pretty nice fashion, Fox offers links to all of their shows and a litany of thumbnail images. I feel that I get much more information from CNN’s homepage, which is what the user wants. Plus, CNN’s links are much friendlier. If you’ll notice, a link to a story on CNN appears like this, after ‘cnn.com’: /2007/US/04/16/vtech.shooting/index.html. Year, region, month, day, name of story. Here is a link following ‘foxnews.com’: /story/0,2933,266463,00.html. This is not informative, nor very nice looking. But news isn’t the only problem area. Because of GMail, I never use my school’s email system.

What got me thinking about this was Google asking students to take their survey about campus email. I am a staunch user of GMail and tell everyone I know to use it. It’s a good interface, easy to use, lots of space and has great IM and Calendar integration. I was also able to make it a one stop shop for sending and receiving email from the multitude of email addresses I have. “Royal Mail,” as the University of Scranton calls it, is not a good experience. It’s poorly designed and not very intuitive. Unless you change the settings, you get oldest mail first, and deleting a lot of email at one time is not easy. But the biggest annoyance I feel, is no search. GMail has excellent functionality here, allowing me not only to quickly find mail, but the search also allows me to use GMail as a file server. And with near 3GB of space, I have the capacity to do so too.

Design and functionality is everything on the web. If your site doesn’t make the user experience easy, you’re app is dead in the water. GMail has turned me away from my school’s lousy email system, and CNN’s design helps me tolerate their particular branding of news (though CNN isn’t nearly as bad as MSNBC).

posted on April 16th, 2007 in Design, Thoughts, Websites| No Comments »

This is part 3 of 5 of the mini series for my new design. In this part I will be talking about the dynamics of the site and using WordPress as a Content Management System (CMS).

A change made more on the back end of this site is all of the pages on the site can now be edited through WordPress. This makes it much easier when I want to update things like my resume, the about page, etc. One of the reasons I never did this before was I did a lot of PHP stuff on the seemingly static pages, and there was no way for me to integrate PHP code via the WordPress admin panel. To fix that problem, I found a plug-in called runPHP.

This handy little plug-in ads a check box to each post asking if I want to run the post or page thought the PHP preprocessor. All I do I add in the php code (with normal tags) and I’ve got dynamic, easy to update pages. This comes especially handy on my projects page, which calls a number of custom functions. With runPHP I can easily change parameters or function calls right from WordPress.

On the same token, my projects page is also completely dynamic. I will talk more about the plug-in I wrote in the next series, but I would like to touch on the fact that this was something I had been planning for a while. I needed an easy way to add, edit and delete projects from my resume site, Casabona.Org. With WordPress, I was able to add another set of pages to the admin panel to do just that. In the coming months I will be combining Casabona.Org and this site, making them fall under one roof. This plug in will make it much easier for me to manage my projects.

Using the power of WordPress, I am able to quickly and easily manage my site, transforming the open source blogging system into a CMS. Now, this site is updated more frequently with some very rich content.

posted on April 3rd, 2007 in Design, Site News| No Comments »

I have been doing a lot of desktop publishing lately- Quark Xpress, Publisher, Photoshop for info graphics and the like. I’ve got to say it has been a nice change of pace from the normal coding sessions I have been doing the past few weeks. Once some of the stuff I have been working on is finalized I will add it to my Projects page. As much as I love coding, it’s been nice to do some design work lately. I can only take so many lines of PHP (and recently those lines have been hitting the thousands).

PS- Once I get time, I’ll be posting some of those projects too!

posted on March 22nd, 2007 in Computer Stuff, Design, Thoughts| No Comments »