DiaLOG

April 27, 2004

Makeover

The US Treasury redesigned the $50 bill and unveiled it yesterday. Currency design has always intrigued me. There are many similarities with it and web design. More on this later. As the Treasury is giving currency a makeover I have been giving my site a makeover. Yet to be revealed but here is a sneak peak of what is to come with Blakems.com in the next week or so.

April 20, 2004

Resources of Old

Back in the day of “old school web design” we didn’t have the resources like we do today. We didn’t have A List Apart, Site Point, or the number of weblogs that provide us a resource in web development. (Or maybe we did, but I didn’t know about them). I ran across a web page on our IDI Intranet the other day that listed our top ‘Design Links’. Some of the resources we used are no longer available but some are still going there, and I really don’t use any of them anymore, but they exists in our web development history adn memories. Here is the list.

Resources of Old (circa 1999–2000)

• Internet.com – Anyone still go there. Too much for me to handle. How many sites did they have under their umbrella?

• Web Reference – Another Intenet.com site on development

• Essential Web Guide – Your starting guide to HTML

• Web Monkey – We all remember the monkey

• Cool Homepages – Was cool back in the day, it is too diluted now.

• 100 Hot sites – It was like cool home pages, dead now

• Design Freak – There were some great designs and artciles here, now lost somewhere

• Lynda – Ah linda, we love lynda and she continues to promote here books. (never bought one, but I remember she had some good resource links.)

• Internet Valley – It has since flooded and been swept away to another domain. I really don’t remember what was here.

• 2 Advanced – Pioneer flash site we all loved and said ‘cool’.

• Adobe Studio – Need help with adobe products. Here is were they where, Dramatically, upgraded since then.

April 14, 2004

Send us your feedback.

Occasionally I will send feedback to websites when they have a redesign or new features. I am usually prompted to do so by a link on their site that says “Send us your feedback”, or “Tell us what you think”. We found this out here at IDI when we inadvertently removed the link from our Array product. We soon found that we where not getting any feedback from recently launched clients like we had when we did have the link. It is back now on our Array product and it does prompt people to respond with feedback.

When MSN launched their new redesign of MSN.com back in december, they had a feedback link. So I gave them some feedback on their site about standards and also on some usabilty with some of their new features. I just noticed the other day that they had changed this feature to work like I had suggested. So the moral of the story is feedback from customers can be valuable.

April 06, 2004

Text Images Rant

You have seen them on websites, (ebay is the biggest abuser), you may have clicked on them, search Engines don’t like them, results can be cheap looking. I am talking about text images. I visited real.com the other day, they have great looking site design but glaring at they top of their screen was a link that was off-center with the rest of the navigation, the text underline made it obvious that this was not standard html text but an image, plus it had no alt tag. What made it worse was the cheap little american flag icon next to that looked as if it had been saved over and over again. Why would a big company like real do this to there website. There are several websites out there today that use this technique, why, maybe it is quicker for them to update an image than html or their programming is built that way. Needless to say, it is a bad practice. Reasons why not to use text images.

• Longer downloads - The real network image weighs 360 bytes, if done in html it would only weigh 136 (113 bytes for the image + 23 bytes for the text).
• Search engines index text better than alt tags from images.
• You don’t have to worry about the kerning or fractional widths setting in photoshop to make it look like a real text.
• More accessible for disabled users.
• Users with cleartype (windows) or quartz(mac) turned on will notice a difference between the two.

Now I am not referring to the use of images for headlines or small type in some intances, but to the uses of text as images that could have been done in html just the same.

April 01, 2004

New Design for blakems

Here is my new redesign for my site. I have been working on it for months and I finally got to point where it is complete. This site was my inspiration. Kindly refresh if you don’t see any changes.

Update: Back by popular demand, I have switched back to the original blakems design. You can still view the corn burner design…

Just toggle between the two design with the links below

Corn Burner Design | Blakems Design