What are the challenges of today?

New Year brings predictions, reviews, summaries, list and reflections like no other date. It makes people think, regroup, refocus and plan. When I look around, this is what I see:

We live in the world that did not exist when we were born. Generation gap is the greatest ever in history of human kind.

Industrial capitalism is at the end of its wits. Development of industries, cities and technology and science jumps over itself and instant obsoleteness is the new norm.

Almost anyone is only a click away. Almost any information is always available. The best minds on the planet can be called to work on global projects and issues in minutes. Many local workers are struggling to adapt.

Economic gap among the richest and poorest is the greatest ever.

Fascination with celebrities’ lives became ‘circus for the masses’, bringing huge entertainment revenues to global networks.

Unprecedented resources are available to us to learn from others. We innovate through re-iteration of things we know to add and improve.

Kids in schools are learning for the jobs that we don’t even know the names of yet – they will be invented in the near future.

Debts of some countries are so unimaginable that money cannot be considered asset based any more.

Social security networks are growing and crumbling at the same time, as they cannot be supported by unstable economies nor indebted governments.

Standard medical care is facing growing pressures of ineffectiveness.

Families are scattered and isolated into mostly single’s and couples‘ dwellings, due to new realities of urban/global living and new relationship models.

Is it all bad, catastrophic, depressing? It is our today. It is not good or bad. This is what it is, and human kind will emerge from it in a mutated, evolved state, as it always have.

Austerity measures and partying

Europe is consolidating financial controls and sticking with austerity measures to avoid collapse of the economy that will have global domino effect of some kind on all of us. We are connected, everyone knows that. If mother has credit card addiction, daughters may end up as entrepreneurs, because the family cannot afford to send them to college. Is that so bad?

Austerity measures are bad for everyone, say economists: you buy less – your employer holds back on benefits or raise because of less revenue – government has less taxes to fund social programs – you spend less. How much less can you spend? – unrest begins?… Alternatively government (like our neighbour in 2008) can just keep printing more money, so you can keep spending. It’s just a paper, right? Well, that piles debt for future generations – our own children…  Rich one percent seem to know how to get richer, and the rest can only think what else to cut out of the budget.

Obviously I am not going to solve any of this, I am just a web developer by choice. What I can observe though, is that after a period of serious austerity, people prioritize and the fun part is not the last on the list. Christmas parties are coming back! There is more small business owners. Some decide to make better websites – good for me! Because I love making better websites.

2012 is not going to be the end of world. This interpretation of Mayan calendar was just a mistake. And the new era begins with every day. Today I will learn something new, I will make it better for someone.

Website design trends 2012

Twenty two year old Internet is in it’s fifth generation – immersed user. Generation rollover is accelerating, and so website design is experiencing more diversity than ever. 65% of small business owners have a website, but 31% still don’t, and out of those who do, some 20% are updating it only once a year. Combine this with the fact that viewer stays on the site only for a few seconds if he/she feels it is out-of-date.

Through the research of top, popular and emerging trends, one can come to this conclusion of what we will see in 2012 websites:

One-page websites

One-page layouts are on the rise with several variations that include: Vertical scrolling with link-embedded content, in absence of traditional navigation; Parallax scrolling; Design under the fold, where interesting content does not end above the first-visible area of the screen.

Large images

Billboard, Print and luxury Magazines designers invaded traditional web domain with their striking imagery that is worth a thousand words. Variations include oversized headers taking full height of the screen, large sliders trending against flash designs (flash has peaked some time ago, and mobile devices will mostly not accommodate that technology), large background images where it does not compete with the content.

Mobile design

It has gone a long way from text-only site alternative through plug-ins, responsive design, to separate mobile edition of the main website that has its own set of rules and technologies. Swipe-touch, no hover effects, fluid width and feel, and lots of different device viewport sizes constitutes quite a knowledge base – dig in. Mobile design is officially in the main stream of design this year, with mobile apps for everything you can imagine useful.

Minimalism

This one evolved, too. It is not your old black and white layout with lots of white space and one font. New minimalist is rich and sophisticated in a subtle way. Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler. Simple is Good. Minimalist design pronounces clear message, right to the point, without clutter. One-page websites are part of this philosophy.

Perspective / 3D

- we will see more often designers do away with a traditional desktop perspective, in favour of more 3D, or side-shot perspective that makes the page more attractive, and adheres to a more realistic view, as long as it still shows well on mobile devices. It may include rich surfaces, where applicable.

Fat footers

There seems to be agreement not to throw anything that didn’t fit into main navigation to the footer any more. Fat footer is now designed for richer content, personalized experience, desirable extras, not an afterthought of main content.

Interactivity

Is not going away, but it becomes more embedded in context. Interconnected with social networks, includes modal boxes with facebook sign-ups to site, sharing what you surf or watch (scary, isn’t it?), interacting with corporate sites in a game playing way.

Built-in activism

Fairness, environment and community involvement interlaces with business models of many new startups. We are going to see more of it, in times of suppressed economical growth.

Typography

This subject is present in every new year trends for quite a time. Makes you think that designers are yearning to distinguish themselves with funky fonts, no matter what the technology cost. Keep in mind that non-standard fonts are mostly not compatible with a diversity of internet devices.
Slab Typefaces – all capital letters, bold and imposing, as in western’s ‘Wanted’ posters have their purpose and strong place as elements of design in the new year, but not as a main theme.

In new design elements trends, one very visible is QR code usage and associated digital art. Taking advantage of huge amount of information that can be crammed into such a small space, QR codes are popping up in lots of places, including small merchandise objects, real estate, business cards, T-shirts, wearables, tatoos, and street advertising. Another visible trend is metamorphism or otherwise called mutant advertising, which is using mutant human appearances to exaggerate advertised message, which is then longer remembered.

Color schemes are very utilitarian, with modern neutrals, grays accentuated with red or orange, and some blueprint inspirations. Greens are still reflecting organic influences in anything environment-related. Large imagery fills sites with lots of vibrant, stunning colors.

So there you have your 2012 work cut out – and don’t forget that facts and opinions get blurred all the time, as the only reality is our own.

Mobile website first?

Your website does not look correctly on 4S?, on other smart phones neither? In fact, it does not even load? Oh, no… What are you going to do?

We first create a website, and then ‘adapt’ it to mobile website, viewable on mobile devices. And how are we doing it? There is lots of ways: mobile plugins, responsive design, conditional css, using grid etc. You can look it up… Shouldn’t though mobile version be created first and given the right to it’s own set of rules and best practices, before treated as hand-me-down version of something bigger and better? You’re right it should!

It may seem like a nuisance to design (and more importantly, maintain up-to-date) a separate mobile website just for mobile devices, but it does make perfect sense, if you know how websites and servers work.

You may think that when the code detects small device, just execute ‘display:none’ for complicated elements and resize your high resolution images and everything will be all right. What about beautifully designed block menus, sparkling with colors on ‘hover‘, centered across fixed width template? What about sophisticated backgrounds and elaborate horizontal galleries? Plugins to popular content management software are well developed to take care of most challenges with mobile web design, but here is something to think about:

Responsive design wakeup call: not displaying large element on a mobile device does not prevent it from being download anyway! What does it mean? Simply, all large files still have to end up on a mobile device before the pages are displayed, even when these large files are already coded to not being shown. It has been proven by looking at the server log files.

Why it matters? Because mobile devices work not on a broadband cable or fiber internet connection like standard computers, but on telecom data packages that have much smaller capacity and are more expensive per megabyte transmitted that way.

It does make a lot of sense to design separate mobile site. Mobile devices are gaining market share as a primary internet channel and cannot be ‘adapted‘ from your main website any longer. Mobile users have specific needs that need to be addressed to sell your products, services, ideas and information.

Focus on one transaction is base of a mobile experience. Content overload has no place on a small screen.

Because of touch screen capabilities, various operating systems and technology, color or greyscale screens – Say NO to:

• Flash
• Fixed-width layout
• Complex navigation paths with submenus
• Playing with hover features
• Low contrast designs

Remember:

• Less is more
• Engage better with focused interaction
• Use simpler interface, text rather than logos with details
• Forget about partner promos, loosely related links, multiple sponsor logos, big ‘About’ pages and fat footers – too much content
• Click on button evolves to touch-and-swipe – be open to NEW

And face it: Your website cannot be all things to all people.
Its functionality and convenience are more important for the best consumer experience than haute couture look and reference library stack of resources combined.

Pumpkin horror

Halloween is coming, and my pumpkin just imploded …Whaaaa… aaaaa… aaaaa…

It was sitting quietly on a silver platter… waiting to be carved. I gazed at it proudly, knowing that this magnificent moment when I have a full picture of how I wanted to shape it, is very near.
I looked at it one more time… and there it was – a big hole in the top, facing my window – how this happened?!

Pumpkin imploded before I was ready. So my journey into mysterious and horrifying insights of the Big Pumpkin begun. Join me in watching what was revealed…

Recession Proof Business

Here we go again. Debt crisis, markets plunging, jobs hanging in delicate balance. Recession proof business is one of the top searches on Google.

I am reading: “Central and eastern Canada must brace for job losses in the months ahead as the slowing of global economy is eminent.”
Ten Doomed Industries article outlines jobs that are already obsolete: Newspaper Publishing, Apparel Manufacturing, Textile Mills, Formal Wear and Costume Rental, Video Postproduction Services, Record Stores, Video Rental, Photofinishing, Manufactured Home Dealers, Wired Telecommunications Carriers.

What can you do after getting a pink slip? Seven million dollar lotto ticket does not happen to everyone (Congratulations to 17 Ottawa manufacturing plant workers who laid off, won such a prize the same evening!!!). So your choices are: standing in long lineups at the job fairs, going back to school or setting your own business.

Recent grads can tell a lot of horror storries – sky-high student debt and sub-standard starting salaries. Graduating engineers have much better than average college grad prospects. Top ten earners categories are: petroleum engineering, chemical, electrical, materials science and engineering, aerospace, computer, physics, applied mathematics and nuclear.

Online career seems like not requiring any significant investment or skills… In every recession fortunes have been made by those who identified current trends.

Here’s a rundown (by no means complete) on what people consider these days the top selling products or services.

Recession proof business picks for online sales seem to be:
Hockey store, jewellery, electronics, pet accessories, sports gear, weight loss and life coaching, dietary supplements.
Bestsellers on Amazon.ca seem to be HDTV cable, iPone screen protectors and flash cards, while on Amazon.com Kindle readers are. Check the link for update as you read this – these lists are changing all the time.

Self-published books:
Outskirts Press, the fastest-growing full-service self publishing and book marketing company top ten titles for August 2011:

Always A Soldier But Never G.I. by Emmett T. Lang
Color Bind by Dr. Herschelle Adams
Dance of the Leaf by Lynn Torre
Engineer Your Own Success by Anthony Fasano P.E.
Going Green Using Diatomaceous Earth How-To Tips by Tui Rose RN
Linebacker in the Boardroom by Marvin A. Russell
March Forth by Marci A. Schmitt
Midlife Momentum by Holly Schut
The Sidecar Kings by Jon Burcaw
Teaching Narcissus to Swim by Scott Wells

Top affiliate marketing schemes:
Mobile Money Machines
Commission Commando
Affiliate Resurrection
Easy Profit Bot

If you want to read more on recession proof businesses, this article may be a good start: Ten Recession Proof Businesses. It lists candy, luxury and super-discount retail, reposession, education, sin items (tobacco, alcohol etc.), technology, health care, and non-cyclical businesses like funerals, utilities, religion, pharma, military and veterinary.

Do you have your own, better idea? The best advise I can give you is – Act on it!
The faster you fail, the faster the success will come. Test and fail, test and fail, until there is test and SUCCESS. Being afraid to fail only pushes you further away from the day you succeed. It’s an opportunity to simplify your life – stop commuting for hours and being stuck in a job you didn’t enjoy anyways. Spend the time the way you want, for your own happiness. For once in history it is easier than ever to test your innovative ideas and launch your own business online. Being yourself may be your greatest hit!

Positive thinking helps a great deal, too. When you visualize what you want to achieve, your subconscious mind will find the ways to get it. So dream your way out of recession right now.

Website accessibility

Websites of the companies that offer goods or services to the public in Ontario must be accessible to people with disabilities. If you have at least one employee and offer goods or services, you are legally required to comply with the Accessibility Standards for Customer Service. Private and non-profit sector organizations will be required to comply by January 1, 2012.

So is your website’s content accessible?

Here are some considerations that need to be addressed in order to achieve accessibility standards. First: don’t despair – there are resources and organizations that can evaluate your website and guide you through fixing most of the problems found.

To make your website accessible, you need to keep in mind that not everyone is using mouse and not everyone has good vision, in addition to computer hardware and internet connection limitations. There are variety of devices that want to “see” your website, like screen readers, audible enhancers, tablets, mobile phones etc.

We will not discuss old browsers and operating systems. The pointers below will only focus on design layout and development guidance that includes people with disabilities and compliance with provincial standards.

Basic issues that need to be addressed are quite simple:
Text size, contrast, keyboard-only navigation, descriptive images and links and content access.

Text size:
Make it easy for the viewer to increase the text size at will, without breaking your tediously developed layout. Check it easily on your finished site by clicking CTRL+ good few times and verifying that it actually changes the font size.

Contrast:
Strong contrast is required between text and background, and that includes visited links, hover attribute and all of this. Test it by taking screenshot of the site’s front end and viewing it in grayscale only. Better yet, ask a senior if he/she can see your website’s content easily. Maybe your designer’s choice of colours was not that cool after all.

Keyboard only navigation:
Not everyone can use mouse to navigate your site and make selections on the screen that seem normal to able bodies. Test how someone using only keyboard can get to the choices you provided for viewers, including all links and form controls.
In many sites created with Content Management Systems for instance you can’t select any of the submenus with a keyboard only. Find alternative ways of navigation. These may include skipping submenus, displaying submenus as main menu in the content of all top level pages, using access keys or tab index etc. Also: stop using the tables already!

Descriptive images and links:
Think about it in terms of the TV’s descriptive video feature. Visually impaired viewers want the images described to them, not missed. To describe your images and links you may use alt and title attributes, tooltips or note boxes. Provide text alternatives for images and audio. And yes, you – Flash developers, are on your own. Good luck with that!

Content access:
This last part deals with screen resolutions and horizontal scrolling. Test that your content is visible on variety of screen sizes and does not require any horizontal scrolling. If you have pdf documents for download, they should be text, and not image based. Scanned and pdf-ed manual or designer-style brochure where you can’t select text, won’t cut it.

Finally, do you know that besides GUI browsers like FireFox, Chrome, Safari or Internet Explorer, there are also non-gui browsers, like voice browser or text browser? Does your website make any sense in one of those?

Isn’t it time you talked to your boss about the accessibility standards implementation deadlines?

For more details on subject, google accesibility standards, WCAG, AODA.

On email etiquette yet again

A lot has been said about email etiquette in the early days, when internet taught us a thing or two about behaviour. Bad emails, whether sent or received, have the consequences that cannot be taken back.
Before the clients leave you, friends never talk to you again and you count opportunities lost to miscommunication, browse through this humble run-down on common blunders:

Don’t use all caps - that’s SHOUTING. Some people want to shout at others – one marketing guru wrote that number of caps in an email is inversely proportional to amount of love one received as a child. Shouted email communicates anger more than information it transmitted.

Don’t show everyone’s email in the open. It will haunt some of your friends for years to come with a spam, as one or more of the addressees are most likely affiliated with some sort of spammers. In the age of collecting email addresses for all kinds of reasons, this one will bite you more than just angry associates.

Be the last stop when trusted with a secret or gossip about mutually acquainted person. You will be confronted for releasing it sooner or later. Internet bullying had severe repercussions on many lives – are you willing to participate in this vicious activity if one day you are on the receiving side? In business relation you may simply end up liable.

Don’t use your business signature in unrelated matters. That’s misrepresentation. Being at work until late in the day, does not stop people from doing private business when they need to. That includes not only family matters, but also volunteer work and moonlight jobs. Signing email with your employer’s signature (because it is automatically inserted when you start writing, or otherwise) in unrelated business can have some far reaching consequences. Notwithstanding being fired for inappropriate use of the company’s time and logo, it may bite you back in so many ways.
Instead of thinking “Look who I am…“ or not thinking at all when sending such an email, consider that the addressee can easily reach your boss or blackmail you, or laugh at your just demonstrated self-esteem problem. Use appropriate signatures for each of your emails.

Don’t write anything that cannot be reprinted in a reputed newspaper. Because of the intrinsic media features, your email may end up in a newspaper, on the facebook, in your mother’s inbox or on your CEO’s desk, all at the same time. Value of a polite, concise and clear message cannot be appreciated enough.

Another point of miscommunication comes from the conviction that: ‘To criticise, you should praise the person first…’ . Known for extreme politeness, Canadians often reflect this in an email.
Have you received an email from your client or boss, saying how great you have done some task, just to read in the next paragraph: Please change this, this, and this, and it turns out when you think about it for a minute, he/she didn’t like what you’ve done at all. It’s not a blunder, but a warning rather to read your emails carefully so you can truly comprehend what was communicated indeed.

Wishing you smooth, effective communication that gets right to the point in a professional, balanced way.
Minibizweb

Standard versus Out-of-the-box

Ad on Craigslist reads: Looking for a developer to create out of the box website. Standard designers need not apply. No mention if this is a site to sell As Seen on TV products or a registration for university courses or a download of heavy metal music…

Out of the box is superior. Period.
I beg to differ. Out of the box is not a goal, not a brand, not a functionality, not a style. It only says: I am different!

Would you buy an out-of-the-box car that has a roof wider than its undercarriage? Would you eat a pizza brought in a wire cage, on a bed of live grass? – it’s out of the box!
Thank you, but I like my website with clear navigation, large enough type and contrast in colours that doesn’t make me squint.

Information architecture was developed for a reason: it is a science and practise of how information needs to be delivered, so people can understand quickly and clearly what is presented to them.
First order of a website is not to be out-of-the-box, but to transpire the message and sensation, so viewer wants the product, whether tangible or knowledge or information . If this involves an artistic poke, a stimulus to the senses, then let be it out of the box when and where it makes sense.
People however are creatures of habit, and when they learn reading from left to write, making it upside-down and flipped all around does not create better website – only annoying one.

Website needs a wholesome vision, but without details that will be implemented by a professional website creator. I did not say a designer nor developer, as putting one above the other is a serious mistake. All-in-one website creator is most often the best choice that is time and cost effective with great final results.

You can download a weekly meal plan, buy all the good ingredients in an upscale store, and when Wednesday comes, sweat in the kitchen three hours over the celebrity’s cookbook to come up with a decent meal for your waiting around the table hungry family. Or… you can pop to local grocery market on your way from work, think creatively for 5 minutes while you are picking fresh, standard, common produce, and in 20 minutes create a great tasting, simple, nutritious meal that will truly benefit your whole family.

Starting from an out of the box design, then passing it to a front-end coder to match it to the pixel, then forcing a programmer to cut in between the lines with back-end databases and functionality that you heard about from your best enemy, and then finding a student who would squeeze in some keywords for SEO, does not make for a great end product website.

I am strong aesthetics proponent and think that programmers are awesome, but you shouldn’t be surprised to know that some very ugly websites are making bags of money and some very sophisticated processes behind other websites see only a few visitors a month. And no, SEO is not a king.

Many factors, including off-line entrepreneurship make up for a website success. All I am saying is that out-of-the-box requests make me laugh. I can do out of the box… But when it actually happens, the project goes round and round and comes back to the point where it is finally turned into quite standard.

There are exceptions, like everywhere, when an artist with technical skills and brilliant mind develops site of his/her dreams, which is all that… and more – but believe me, that person was not stamped upon by a micromanaging client.

Give your all-in-one website creator a subject and some freedom, and you will get a great, fresh, final product.

Customer is always right

Web design is a service industry. Web designers do what clients ultimately want to see.  And this is a two-sword weapon which may easily kill both – the client and the designer. Since the picture is worth thousand words, design should speak for itself, right? I would certainly hope to think so, but one can only see what one wants to see when one is ready to see it. There… It’s a long saying – maybe you need to read it again to understand what I mean.

Designer’s view: After client told me about his business and who is his potential clientele, I had a great visualization of what is needed to attract this audience. Every element on this page was carefully placed, designed and coloured to be right where a viewer’s eye is landing according to usability and impulse behaviour studies, supported by computer-human concepts and marketing copy school of practice. Few changes and the site was launched. Nice piece to show as a reference link in upcoming proposals? … nope. In a week font is changed, logo lost proportions, background does not fit the scheme, and text is expanded 5-fold, where it was planned for 2 small paragraphs…

Site does not generate any impact and the owner is wondering why the very few viewers that managed to find his site, left within 2 seconds, plus – I have nothing to show for my work; this link is lost as a showcase.
Site owner’s view: I like medium gray as a background. Joe-the-big-retailer has it on his site. And I like Lucida handwriting font more than the plain arial. Hmm, it didn’t show up on my co-worker’s computer…

Asked intern to add reflection and shadow to logo – I told designer I wanted web 2!
Viewer’s visiting the site: This page looks so small with gray edges, must be old… What is he selling? I can’t even see what he’s selling – so much squinty text… I’m going back to google…
There is a comic depicting “How a Web Design Went Straight to Hell“. In short, client (rightfully) wants to make suggestions and improvements. But he doesn’t fully understand the reasons behind your design choices, and so his “minor tweaks” stray the website away from its goal. The design deteriorates, the designer gets depressed and exhausted, the client feels unappreciated and the relationship breaks down.

Our clients have their own taste and ideas. Everyone does. So your website viewers have often very different feelings what persuades them to buy.

How can you know then which design idea is right? You can’t really until you have enough traffic to do real-time real-world analytical testing with web optimizer, where designer creates few looks or layouts and these split designs are served to different groups of your website viewers. The layout that creates more desirable actions, like buying your product or staying longer on site and browsing more pages or signing up, wins! Even if it has a purple background…

Consumer ultimately decides. And by the time he/she does, let your designer design – even if with the low startup traffic you have to publish alternative designs every so often. Otherwise you are losing buyers blindly.

Web design is an extremely practical discipline by nature. There is a fine balance between satisfying client wants and delivering on business objectives. Trust helps it happen.
www.minibizweb.com