Southwest Virginia Blogs

The resonant sound of me beating my head against my desk. If you require the services of a graphic designer, here’s how it should go:

• Have a meeting to define the project.
• Define the project.
• Pass definition of project to designer.
• Designer creates product as defined, supplies you with proof.
• Make corrections and/or approve of design, (keeping in mind that it should fulfill the need defined in the first two bullets).
• Project is completed.

Doesn’t that work nicely. A beginning (defining project), a middle (design project), and an end (approve and complete project). Projects seem to work best this way. The way they sometimes go is more along the lines of:

• Pass definition of project to designer.
• Designer creates product as defined, supplies you with proof.
• Have a meeting to define the project.
• Define the project.
• Make vague and confusing corrections to design based on flawed definition, (remembering to blame the designer for doing what you asked him to do in the first place).
• Designer makes corrections, supplies you with proof.
• Berate designer for not meeting the new definition of project (which you still haven’t supplied him/her with)
• Repeat last three steps several times.
• Approve of project
• Pass definition of project to designer. (Confirming to him/her that while the project is approved, it still fails to meet definition in some key area, thus justifying your threats of non-payment).
• Project is completed.

What an annoying mess. In the end, the project will be completed, I’ll get paid (well), and I’ll move on to something else. I really should stop dealing with this client, but they’ve been good to me in the past and it’s hard to break out of a relationship like that, dysfunctional as it may be. Their last two projects have gone this way. Both times they’ve supplied me with complete and thoroughly detailed plans for projects, only to scrap that plan midway through the project.

Thud. Thud. Thud…

The Dangers of Modern Automotive Conveniences - Popular Mechanics

And I thought how much safer I was, driving in my 50-year-old Jaguar XK120–with no side windows, no radio, no distractions–than these women were in their new truck with its ABS, airbags and other modern tech.

Why? Because I was paying attention. - Jay Leno, Contributing Editor

Yes, that Jay Leno.

I see this sort of driver on the road every day. They are no longer in control of the technology, but the technology is in control of them.

I also see this sort of thing in design. I see an advertisement and I can identify the software used to lay it out because the designer used default settings or the free clip art that came with it. The designer is no longer in control, they are letting the software control the design. Now most people wouldn’t be in a position to recognize software, but that’s not the point. If you’re letting your software make your decisions for you, that is a problem. While the chances of a tragically fatal graphic design accident are slim, the chances your career will be mangled are much higher. Take control, make the software work for you. Then when somebody sees one of your designs and says, “How did you know to do that?” You can honestly say, “Because I was paying attention.”

IE6 is giving me fits today. Something that seems to have been included in an automatic update last week is causing IE6 to fail on a site that I work on. Pages not loading, forms not loading, freezing up after loading, a whole list of problems. Driving me nuts. It only effects IE6, and not every computer seems to be effected. No idea what’s going on here. If I don’t see a solution soon, something is going out a window.

Sidenote: If you’re less than 150 lbs., and would in some way fit out of a 2′ x 3′ window, you might not want to walk into my office right now.

The The Dilbert Blog had an interesting point a couple of days ago. I missed it the first time I read it, but I was reminded of the post again today.

If everyone exposed to a product likes it, the product will not succeed.

The reason that a product “everyone likes” will fail is because no one “loves” it. The only thing that predicts success is passion, even if only 10% of the consumers have it.

That’s a great description of something I’ve thought about before:

Too many people these days try for the middle ground. They try to have consensus. They want everyone to think they are OK. I don’t want everyone to think I’m just OK. I’d rather have a few people think I’m damn good, even if a few think I’m a little nuts in exchange. To me the biggest regret I could have in my life wouldn’t be looking back and saying “I failed”. My biggest regret would be not to have tried.

Aiming for mediocre doesn’t work. It’s virtually impossible to hit a middle ground with anything. Don’t try to please everyone. Strive for passion in whatever you do, and you’ll have success. Not everyone will like what you do. Some though, maybe only a few, will love it!

h/t Creating Passionate Users

I’ve been working in circles for the last few days. Work best described as herding cats. Working hard, little progress, not all progress is forward. The CSS on a site I’m building has been giving me fits. Turns out most of my problem was caused by Margin Collapse. Fortunately that annoying problem is fixed now and I can move on to something interesting.

It’s sad when the most productive thing you’ve done all day is spend a few minutes fixing a CSS problem for someone else. A designer from England e-mailed me a CSS problem that was bugging him. The link styles on a site he’s building were a little off. He had styles that weren’t defined quite narrow enough. Made for an interesting now you see it, now you don’t problem. It’s nice to know that one thing is working that wasn’t before. It didn’t help my own productivity any, but you take what you can get.

Seth’s Blog: Where are the tweakers?

If I want my car to go a bit faster, there’s a garage in town that will tweak it for me.

If I want my stereo to sound a little better, there’s a guy who will install cables and such and upgrade it.

There are more than a billion websites. Where are the tweakers?

Another great post by Seth Godin. Tweakers, a favorite subject of mine. A job that requires an odd mix of talent, organization, and inspiration. The one common theme in my rather eclectic employment history is probably my penchant for tweaking the design departments I’ve worked in. Every design job I’ve had, save one, has included a significant amount of transition. Upgrading software and hardware, streamlining procedures, restructuring of the department in some way. Transition is somewhat in the nature of the profession, but I seem to be attracted to companies that need help getting their design departments back on track. It’s very rewarding to look back and see the changes you’ve made.

I don’t think I exactly qualify as one of Mr. Godin’s Website Tweakers, but in the last few months especially I’ve been doing a lot of that sort of thing. I’m really looking forward to see where this goes.

mobcode » Don’t thrash

Another way developers act like computers is they thrash. You have seen your computer do this. You try to run too many things at once. The computer runs out of memory and starts swapping to and from disk. You hear the disk grinding and performance grinds to a halt as the computer is stuck constantly swapping back and forth to disk. Nothing gets done.

A clever post, and very true. Nothing ruins productivity like adding the one extra job that you didn’t have time for.

Silly me, I keep giving people what they ask for rather than what they want.

Instance number one:
I am working with another web developer who recently asked me for a template for a series of webpages that need to look like simplified versions of a site that I maintain. His content will be placed within that as a resourse for our mutual clients. I need a template. I supply the template. No, no, I just need the images. I supply him with the images. (which are readily available on the site, but that’s another story) I don’t know how to place these so that they align properly. Hmmm, maybe I should send him a template, so he can see how I aligned them…

Instance number two:
Another professional I work with: I need a screen shot of Site X. Sure, give me a second and I’ll take one and crop off everything you don’t need. No, just take the shot and send me the file. I send the file. What the hell all this extra stuff? I remind him that I suggested that I crop off everything extraneous. I just want a full screen image. I remind him that Site X is 760 pixels wide in a fixed width layout, while my screen resolution is 2304 x 1280. At “full screen” there’s a little extra left over. We’ve had this conversation before… repeatedly. He admires my dual monitor setup whenever he’s here, but yet I always get “What the hell all this extra stuff?“. Is it time to go home yet?

Problem solving HTML isn’t always quite as straight forward as it could be, but here are a few tips to rule out the more common problems.

• Check your spelling - one misplaced letter or space can throw off your layout
• Check for capitalization errors - web servers are often case sensitive, so proper capitalization in links and other code can matter
• Check for improperly nested tags
• Run a validation check - As well as the big problems, this will find a lot of the annoying little problems that can add up to something bigger

Here are a few HTML resources that I use frequently:

• HTML 4.0 Reference
• HTML Colors
• HTML Help by The Web Design Group
• HTMLSource: HTML Tutorials
• WDG HTML Validator Direct Input

CSS is a little more tricky. It isn’t always intuitive, and it’s cascading nature can cause confusing consequences to otherwise harmless mistakes. The problem solving checklist is however, very similar:

• Check your spelling both in the html and the CSS.
• CSS is case sensitive, so check for capitalization errors both in the html and the CSS
• Run a validation check
• Check your DIV positioning - This is surprisingly important. Unlike table cells, DIVs don’t have to fall in sequential order, so DIVs you think are concentric can be in reality sequential, or visa versa. I use FireFox’s Web Developer extension to verify positioning and nesting.

My favorite CSS resources:

• A List Apart: Articles: CSS Design: Going to Print
• Print Different
• glish.com : CSS layout techniques : 3 columns, the holy grail
• css/edge
• The W3C CSS Validation Service

Another intersting post at MobCode. It’s a strategy for learning… and I suppose life.

Chart a course

So chart a course. Look around and see what there is to know. Think about your career and what you want to be doing. Think about your skills and how you can round out your experiences or increase your depth in key areas. Decide where you are going and make a plan to get there. You don’t need a detailed week-by-week plan, but at least identify some steps to get where you want.

IE 7.0 Technical Changes Leave Web Developers, Users in the Lurch

My advice is simple: Boycott IE. It’s a cancer on the Web that must be stopped. IE isn’t secure and isn’t standards-compliant, which makes it unworkable both for end users and Web content creators. Because of their user bases, however, Web developers are hamstrung into developing for IE at the expense of established standards that work well in all other browsers. You can turn the tide by demanding more from Microsoft and by using a better alternative Web browser. I recommend and use Mozilla Firefox, but Apple Safari (Macintosh only) and Opera 8 are both worth considering as well.

I think I linked to this in a round about fashion before, but it bears repeating. I particularly like “Boycott IE. It’s a cancer on the Web that must be stopped.” I’ve added the links in the quote above. I refuse to link to IE of any version.

I’ve been working on a number of design pieces with large volumes of text lately. Some of them had an appropriate amount of text for what they were, several should have been much more to the point. I have come up with some thoughts on the proper use of punctuation:

• Use some. - 500 word with no punctuation is not clever and catchy, it’s a bad Word Jumble.
• If some is good, more is not better. - Putting three or more exclamation points on every sentence doesn’t make them more important, it makes you an idiot.
• A comma and an em dash are not interchangeable. - Learn how to use punctuation properly, then do it.
• Be consistent. - A foolish consistency may be the hobgoblin of little minds, but sometimes it’s a good thing.

It’s amazing what people will supply you with in terms of text. They go on and on about how important their project is to them, then supply you with a load of incoherent drivel for text. I need to charge more.

Internet Explorer 7 v Firefox 2.0

It pains me to say it, but my initial impression is that for a lot of people, there’s no real reason to head to Firefox. Internet Explorer is such a large improvement over version 6 that it’s hard to imagine what would get you to bother downloading it, unless you’re a Mozilla fanboy or an extensions addict.

Any comparison that ends with “there’s no real reason to head to Firefox” is not worth taking seriously. How about this for a reason: Microsoft has a long record of security weaknesses. Combine this to Microsoft’s insistence on making IE an integral part of the operating system and you have to be an idiot to trust them for your Internet security.

On a completely computer geek level you need to also take into account the CSS compatibility issue. If IE 7 was intended to be such a huge improvement over version 6, why didn’t they improve IE’s CSS compliance more than 2%?

Great, IE 7 is a huge improvement… over it’s highly flawed predecessor. That doesn’t exactly inspire confidence.

A very nice post over at Mobcode about what to put on your website.

If you are looking for development work on the web then create a web site for yourself. Very few of the developers in the market have web sites to promote themselves. So (although it is hard to believe considering how many useless web sites there are) this is a way to differentiate yourself.

And here is what you need to put on it: