Through all of the usability, navigation, design, various user-related laws and a healthy handful of information and hierarchical tricks and skills, something that continues to elude designers and developers is pretty URLs. Mind you, SEO experts would balk at the idea that companies don’t think about using pretty URLs in order to drive search engine placement. There is something else to consider in the meanwhile:
The user.
Several articles I found talk about the SEO benefits of pretty URLs and whether it is very important to consider using them with a site as they don’t encourage a major boost anymore. “It’s ten years too late,” they say. It’s never too late, I say. Continue Reading »
When I wrote my first post about object-oriented content, I was thinking in a rather small scope. I said to myself, “I need content I can place where I need it, but I can edit once and update everything at the same time.” The answer seemed painfully clear: I need objects.
Something funny happened between then and now. I realized that content is already made up of objects. All at once, I discovered I was one with all of the content scattered across the web. It was a very zen moment I’m not sure I could recreate on my best day.
See, we are already working with content objects everywhere, but we just haven’t noticed. Take Twitter for instance. Twitter specializes in the content object. It’s a very small object, but it’s there all the same. Take, for instance, a tweet from my feed.
My one tweet is both content on its own and it is part of my feed which is also content. The same can be said for blog posts, RSS feeds, Facebook status updates, YouTube videos, that picture of your cat and any other of a number of things scattered across the web. Continue Reading »
A little earlier this month, I made a post to Posterous called “What Have I Done?” It was less a post about what I had done as what I was doing. Here we are, approaching the end of the month and I’ve just completed phase one of what I was doing.
In saying all that, I would like to oficially kick this post off with a bit of rejoice. CobbleSite version 1 is complete and ready for people to play with it. Let’s just call it a version though it’s not. Not really, anyway. This is exciting for me as I get to do more than simply blog about what I do, I get to show it.
All of this isn’t very useful if I don’t share a little about why I did it. I mean, what’s so special about just one more content management system if it’s built to be a variant on everything else that is already out there? There is, after all, one major difference: Continue Reading »
This morning I read a post about wireframes and when they are appropriate. Though I agree, audience is important, it is equally important to hand the correct items to the audience at the right times. This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t create wireframes.
There is an inherent problem with simply not creating wireframes before the design process begins. If the designer is handed a stack of content and a few images that represent what the stakeholders would like to see incorporated, the project can land, very quickly, in a swamp.
The designer won’t have user data to work with. The site may lack important flow and the information presented may become lost in a design which is appealing and hard to use. Wireframes do more than simply offer a low-fidelity idea of what the design is going to look like in the end. Continue Reading »
With the advent of Ruby on Rails (RoR or Rails) as well as many of the PHP frameworks available, MVC has become a regular buzzword. Everyone claims they work in an MVC fashion though, much like Agile development, it comes in various flavors and strengths.
So, what is really going on here?
The idea behind MVC as well as many other design patterns, is to break programming tasks into chunks and handle them independently. MVC typically fills a need on the web as the view or UI is what the user ultimately sees and keeping it uncluttered makes life easier for the creatives to work their magic after the programmers have performed theirs. Continue Reading »
How many times have you been on a website and said those very words? You click on a menu item, expecting to have content appear in much the same way everything else did. Then, BANG you get fifteen new browser windows and a host of chirping, talking and other disastrous actions.
Boy, I didn’t expect THAT to happen.
You’ve fallen prey to a violation of what I call page-behavior taxonomy. In short, page-behavior taxonomy is a set of rules that certain items must follow when they perform an action or page-behavior. Wikipedia does a reasonable job of telling the user what they should expect after they perform an action as each type of link looks a certain way. Continue Reading »