TheJoey.Net

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 »

This is part 2 of a 5 part series starting here. This post is going to focus on the overall design of the site, and some of the decisions I made regarding it.

The first thing some might notice is that this design is wider than my other ones. I decided in creating this new template to go with a site optimized for a 1024 screen resolution. According to w3schools, only 14% of users have a screen resolution of 800×600. That is compared to 80% using 1024×768 or higher. This is also down 11% from September, the last time I checked the numbers. Further more, my target audience is tech-savvy people and college students. I’m sure if we break those numbers down into these two demographics, the number of 800×600 users would be even less.

With this new design I also wanted to move away from a tradition blog template. I made it so one post would appear on the homepage, along with a number of other resources I’ve made available. These resources include my Resume, Projects, links, and of course the traditional (to this site) site navigation. I did this in an effort to merge Casabona.Org and this site into one. I’ve also create TheJoey.Net’s first logo. It’s a circle broken into 4 quarters. Each quarter represents one of the following: Personal, Professional, Play and Projects. The Personal is any news or information having to do with me. Professional for the work I do for clients through JLC Web Design. Play is for fun/cool things I might find interesting and Projects for side projects I am working on on my free time.

I hope the new design has also made the site a little more user friendly for post navigation and searching. If you have any questions or comments, of course feel free to leave them below!

posted on March 14th, 2007 in Design, Site News| No Comments »

Introduction

I suppose if I had to give this version a number, I’d say it’s version 4.0. TheJoey.Net has seen 3 major redesigns and I had a “blog” when I first started web design. This design by far has seen the most innovation and customization on my part. On the About Page it says this site is my sandbox. That is the absolute truth, and probably the reason the design changes so often (I’d say once a year is pretty often). But this time around I wanted something that will hopefully last longer than that. So not only did I work in a ‘change of face,’ I added new features and showcased some of my new skills.

What’s Coming

This mini series on the redesign will probably be four posts: Design, Dynamics, Projects and Plug-ins. Within these four posts I’ll be able to talk about all of the new and improved features of the site. For example, I am using a layout optimized for a 1024 screen resolution instead of 800. I also changed all of the pages so they can be updated from the back end. I worked in some Ajax and wrote my first plug in.

What do you want?

If there is a feature you want to hear specifically about, just leave a comment and I will make note of it. I personally think I was about to do some cool stuff, and while there is still some house keeping I need to attend to, I am happy with how the site came out.

posted on February 24th, 2007 in Design, Site News| | show comment » « hide comment