There will be no new posts here. I created a new blog with a new name and design. It has the same content as this one.

Please update your bookmarks. Have a nice day.

When and Where
Monsanto on Friday, November 10, 2006 from 8:00a.m. - 5:00p.m. The conference is filling up fast. Only 100 participants allowed to register.

How Much
$30 before July 31st and $45 after August 1st. All proceeds from registration fees are used to fund conference logistics. The conference continues to be maintained by a "grassroots" organization -- all planning, coordination, presentations, etc. are done by user experience practitioners for user experience practitioners.

Keynote Speaker
Dirk Knemeyer. Dirk will be presenting "The Future of Digital Product Design."

Interactive Poster Session
New this year -- a poster that will be created by participants during the conference. We'll provide a space for you to share your favorite research, technique, and tool sites and we'll publish it after the conference for all attendees.

Click for Agenda

Registration
When you register for this year's conference, you'll be asked to complete a section with your personal information. You'll then be asked to pre-select the sessions you would like to attend. This allows UX06 to ensure that they have the proper facility arrangements for each presentation. Spaces will fill up fast, so register as early as possible to ensure you get to attend the sessions of your choice.

After you complete registration, you'll see a link to PayPal. A special thanks to Gateway CHI for kindly offering their PayPal account as a way for us to collect registration fees. Your registration payment is a separate step and can only be completed by using a PayPal account that is either linked to your bank account or by using your credit card to pay your registration fee.

All proceeds from registration fees are used to fund conference logistics, meals, etc. If you cancel your registration, your fee WILL NOT be refunded. Registration for STLUX06 is open now through November 1st. Register by July 31st to receive the Early Registration discount. For security reasons, no on-site registration will be allowed; if you want to attend, you must register by the November 1 deadline. Register using the link below: (a big thank you to Maritz for the very generous donation of their registration tool)

https://www.meetinghq.com/group/101005647?wslid=attendee

Questions?
Jennifer Ruffino
jennifer.ruffino@monsanto.com
314-694-4649

I’ve been a member of LinkedIn for over a year. Although the idea of an exclusive way to make business connections seems great, I have some reservations about the idea of exclusivity and accuracy. The concept of endorsing someone, a mini testimonial, is totally self-serving. How can that lend credibility to one’s self-described professional abilities?

The social fabric created in LinkedIn - the ability to see who is linked to whom and the degrees of separation - is interesting, but what real purpose does it have? I guess it allows one to use someone to gain access to someone else - a connection pimp. I haven’t really connected with anyone via an existing connection and I view this site and my participation as an experiment and don’t have any expectations. Only time will tell if this virtual network has validity.

If you are a member, contact (mail at jamesbielefeldt dot com) me, let’s get connected.

I’m working on several projects for a corporation to improve different processes centered on their web development efforts: better proposals, better cost estimating, better cost reporting, and standardization of workflows.

Each of these assignments is independent on one level, but also interrelated on another. Herein lies the rub. Every time I make progress, a meeting is required to communicate my findings – emails don’t get replied to; phone calls are out of the question; if it isn’t in Outlook it doesn’t exist. At every meeting a new caveat is introduced eradicating any realized progress.

Should Sue be involved? You need to double check that with Bill. That’s not how we do it. That won’t work. Isn’t that related to John’s initiative?

Maybe Sue should be involved but she is way too busy already. Bill didn’t reply to my emails and after three weeks I guess he doesn’t care. I know that’s not how you do it. Your way isn’t good. That’s why I’m suggesting a different approach. Let’s try it to see if it “won’t work”. Yes it is related to John’s initiative, but what’s the chance of accomplishing anything by getting more people involved?

All I hear is “We want change, but only if we don’t have to change or do anything”

Typical corporate grid lock. A small smart company tries things out, changes constantly, accepts failure, adjusts and moves on. There is a lesson here. By tackling issues one at a time, whether related or not, incremental change can happen and results realized much faster and painlessly than forming a committee, having umpteen meetings and waiting on everyone and their brother to weigh in. Assume the risk and go for it.

STLToday has its new homepage up. From seeing the news page yesterday, I envisioned it would look better. I was wrong. It’s big. Really big. Wide and long. A sea of high-contrast. Why so much same size, no leading, bold type?

I guess you can say it’s newspaper-like because of its size, but it’s certainly not good web. Above the fold is prime web real estate. Could more space be wasted at the top? The feature callout in the center is weak, but I see Flash is suitable for their advertisers now. There’s inconsistent use of section headers. No hierarchy of content other than placement. What’s with the random colors in the “What You’re Looking For” section?

With all the fine examples of news sites and portals out there how can anyone think this design is acceptable? I give them a ‘F’.

STLToday, stop trying to design this site yourself. You don’t have what it takes. Hire professionals. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch newspaper was recently redesigned by professionals and it looks good. Do the same for this. Please!

A creative fellow, Transfatty, with a terminal disease trying to make a difference.

I worked with the team that originally designed STLToday. The idea was to have a news site with a magazine layout: white space, uncluttered copy, limited use of banners ads, easy look at, and style. The Managing Director, who is no longer there, had a cutting-edge vision for a news web site.

When the site launched in 2000 the St. Louis Post-Dispatch newspaper, the owner, also had their news site running, postnet.com, but STLToday aggregated news from several sources – no easy task – and was intended to be different from the newspaper’s site.

Almost immediately the vision began to fade.

Within the first month all Flash was removed from the site. At that time the Macromedia Flash player has 92% market penetration and the few people that complained got their way. Luckily, we were able to replace the Flash elements with DHTML and kept the design intact.

The site lost money because of its policy not to have a lot of ads. They pursued sponsors for sections and tastefully displayed that affiliation, but it wasn’t profitable. The visionary Director was replaced and the site’s metamorphosis hastened.

Slowly, the new Creative Director began to change the look and in a few months the site did not resemble its original self; bevels, drop shadows and bad graphics invaded the tasteful layout. About that time the newspaper closed its site and decided STLToday would stand for all. Here came banner ads, a lot of banners. They also began to employ Flash overlay ads – those are sexy. White space was no more and clutter, compressed clutter, dominated the design.

Last year the site was completely redesigned. A hard-to-look-at red and 3D Photoshop effects prevailed. This design was ridiculous. People must have complained. (As of 6/14/2006 the homepage is this design.)

St. Louis’ number one web site, according to the STLToday, has a new look, or as of today, 6/14/2006, part of a new look.

The new design, shown on the main news and other sections, keeps the red, but it’s toned down a bit. The ads are still everywhere, but there’s more white space and they have widened the layout for 1024px wide screens. I bet they’ll hear about that. Gone are the Photoshop effects – must be a new Creative Director. This is a move in the right direction, but I wouldn’t call the design good, but it is much easier to look at. Hopefully they’ll continue to improve it and get rid of that red altogether.

I’d like to see STLToday be successful and look good, but they have a lot of work ahead. One of their biggest problems is their owner. Another is they run the site on an IBM Lotus Notes system and Domino server. This is not the easiest animal to tame. They would be better served with a different technology. There’s also the whole Web Standards thing. This is a perfect case for Web Standards. Just think of the flexibility they’ll have, less bandwidth use and improved accessibility.

I wish they would have left it as it was originally. Maybe it wasn’t perfect, but it was much better than anything they’ve had since.

I’m for copyright protection as much as anyone, but it seems there are times when it goes too far. Three examples come to mind. The most recent is the litigation surrounding the term Web 2.0. The term was coined by a company for a conference, but has grown to represent more than that.

Two other, bigger, instances of copyright protection gone awry are Final Four, the NCAA basketball tournament, and Superbowl. Recently broadcast media and advertisers have had to awkwardly dance around these two terms. Copyright them if you like, but allow the use for reasonable purposes. They have grown to larger than life proportion and it doesn’t make sense to prohibit their use, since most uses benefit the authors. Copyright can still be enforced in case of malicious activity.

Microsoft has launched a suite of new products geared towards the interface design and development market - ala Photoshop, Flash, Dreamweaver, After Effects and the like. I don’t think Adobe is too worried at this point. Microsoft’s reputation on developing good graphics software is far from exemplary and FrontPage and the Visual Studio IDE editor are barely usable.

The three Expression products are Graphic Designer, Interactive Designer and Web Designer. Each has its own specialty, but they are made to work together and work with Visual Studio rounding out a full design-build environment.

Hopefully the usability and general attractiveness of Microsoft built software will improve because of the increased exposure and access to this type of software in PC-land. Not that design products are Mac only, but there is a huge rift between developers that are visually sensitive and those that live on function alone.

A new underlying technology that is integrated into these products is XAML. Similar to how SVG works, XAML is going to allow graphics to be applied and transported in new ways not really possible today. Another new technology is WPF a direct competitor to Flash's format.

Maybe stodgy Microsoft can give cool Adobe a little competition, but I won’t hold my breath. However, they are bringing new technologies to market; making a big effort towards web standards, interoperability, compatibility and open source initiatives; and bridging the gap between them and everyone else.

I have a peeve and need to rant.

I don't know how many times I've seen companies with a positioning statement that begins "The Art and Science of..."

Business is not art, or science. Business is business and most companies do "something" to make money and "something" is perceived as a necessary evil.

Another phrase beat to death is "Exceeding customer expectations".

No kidding. Who strives to disappoint?

Advice to corporate marketing gurus: Be specific. What makes your company unique? If you can't think of something, don't say anything.

I just took a look at the newly designed Yahoo! homepage. While there are a few glitches and the design is not site wide, one can see what they are trying to achieve.  An opinion is worth want it costs and everybody has one, but I’ll offer a few anyway.

Goodbye 800x600 - The new design has been widened to fit in a 1024 pixel wide screen. Last I heard, web user’s monitor resolutions were about 50/50, 800x600/1024x768. I guess they are trying to appeal to those who have the latter – the cool people. One would think they would stick with the lowest common denominator for a site that is trying to appeal to everyone. At least they are providing an option to view the old design at the 800 pixel width. MSN and Google have the narrower format.

Web 2.0 Look - They’ve adopted some of the trendy web 2.0 design elements like gradients, 3-D icons and modular page architecture, but they didn’t go all the way by using nice font selection – not a serif on the page. This could have been pushed a bit farther.

DHTML – I like the DHTML used in the upper right box containing mail, weather, messenger…, but the tabs in the new areas are pretty weak.

Navigation – I question the order of the primary nav menu. Alphabetical is logical, but is it usable? They should have ordered items by traffic with the highest at the top. The small links at the very top of the page are useless. Most people won’t see them. The Small Business menu looks neglected. Business users need love too. I think more attention should have been put into that menu.

Image Use – The thumbnails are too small.

Advertising – I like the limited ad space, but I’m sure that will change.

Standards and Validation – Here’s the biggest question. If you are going to redesign a site like this, why is it not compliant to today’s web standards and have valid mark-up? Most of the layout is done using CSS and DIVs, but the architecture is not remotely semantic. I validated the old design using the W3C HTML validator. It had 158 errors, while the new design had only 114. I guess you can call this an improvement. (MSN had 24 validation errors) A portal for the masses that needs maximum accessibility should validate and have semantic mark-up. I’m sure they have tested the new design in a wide variety of devices, so it must display properly, or acceptably, but this is certainly not a case study for web standards. It would be interesting to learn the details on how they arrived here.

Overall, it’s a big improvement from the days when they didn’t have any design, just a logo, form and text links. They have a balance and it’s a much better site than MSN.

This cracks me up – Web 2.0. It’s interesting how a catch phrase gets started. If anything, the burst of the dotcom bubble should signify the change of version, but it wasn’t until recently this term has become so ubiquitous. There are many things that folks equate to Web 2.0: Web Standards, blogs, broadband, and AJAX, but these have all been around for a while. I don’t like the distinction of versioning. The web wasn’t re-installed with upgrades overnight, but I digress. Let’s focus on web advertising, or better yet, the evolution of web advertising and I’ll use the 1.0, 2.0 vernacular.

Web 1.0 Ad Types

In the beginning there was the banner ad, one size, 468px by 60px, dictated by Yahoo!. Now there are a zillion sizes and little standardization. This really needs to be cleaned up a bit.  The banner ad is annoying, yet rather passive and easily ignored, but here to stay. Also in this category are interstitials, which are ads place in line with actual content rather in the header, footer, or margins of a page as banners usually are.

Then, in a moment of inspiration the pop-up ad was born - I believe from use in porn sites. This has spread like an STD and plagued the web for years, but I haven’t seen one in at least 2 years due to the ingenious pop-up blocker. I use the Google variety. It’s fun seeing how many ads you didn’t see. This form of advertisement is almost completely ineffective and very obtrusive.

The next generation of pop-ups was floating, or overlay ads. These monsters are contained in the same browser window as the page being viewed, but display on top of the content. To this day I cannot believe this is acceptable. It's bad web. 

2.0 Ad Types

The most interesting form of web 2.0 advertising is viral marketing. This wasn’t created; it just happened and was adopted by ad agencies. In its natural form it’s peer-to-peer, honest sharing of information, but what has happened companies create fake interest in a product or brand by using email, portals, ezines and blogs. Many times the advertiser’s efforts are wasted because they are exposed, or cannot emulate true interest that is generated by real people.

Advertisers are creating video and audio commercials specifically for the web or at least with the web in mind as a secondary medium. This is a recent phenomenon because of the effectiveness of viral marketing. These messages can reach a target audience for a fraction of the cost of conventional broadcast media. It also allows companies to produce outrageous ads that could never exist anywhere but the web. Sites like YouTube and Kontraband provide the forum to display this content.

Blogs and the blogsphere have become the fertile ground of viral marketing. Usually containing text, blogs can also include images, audio and video content. Bloggers publish to their sites daily supplying the web with a constant stream of collective consciousness. I call it reality web. People tend to believe what they read on blogs, although there’s no guarantee of authenticity on the web.

I would be remiss if I didn’t also mention podcasts. Podcasts are audio and sometimes video downloadable files that can be played on one’s computer, or portable mp3/video player like the iPod, from which they get their name. This content can be audio books, recorded presentations, or carefully produced pieces and each could have ads placed within the content.

It's hard to predict what ad types the Web 3.0 will bring us. I hope they will be clever and interesting. Maybe if we're lucky we'll stop getting spammed, but I’ll save email for another post.

Although the web is still an infant, it provides more possibilities and more potential than other any medium. With what other channel can you control when, what and how you are presented information? Interactivity, personalization & on-demand content are the web’s strengths.

Interactivity is a powerful attribute. Joseph Jaffe calls it the fourth dimension. I like that. TV is highly entertaining, but one call yell at the TV till hoarse and it doesn’t do any good. On the other end of the spectrum are video games are the ultimate interactive experience where one controls almost every aspect of their environment. However, a game doesn’t have a goal of communication.

Good web sites are somewhere in the middle and capitalize on interactivity by collecting information, and presenting content to users based on events, or preferences. Interactivity leads to personalization. This is how a site “remembers” one’s name, what happened on the last visit, or what content to display. Broadcast media cannot do this; it shotguns content at the world in hopes of its message is understood. Every time one watches a movie, it is the same sequence of events, but each time one visits a web site, the experience can be totally different - powerful stuff.

Another huge property of the web is on-demand content. Broadcast media air content on a schedule - the show starts at 8:00 o’clock. One the web, the show starts at the click of a button. Tivo has given us some control over TV and its popularity proves we live in an on-demand world.

When I plan a site, especially as part of a cross-media campaign, I try to think how the site can use these traits to effectively communicate. This in turn leads to how the message is formatted and delivered. The message needs to be “Webified.” If not properly conceived, too often a site ends up being an on-line TV commercial, or just a digital brochure. It does not gain strength from interactivity and fails to provide the positive experience to make it successful.

This site is unbelievable.

Archive.org - The Internet Archive is building a digital library of Internet sites and other cultural artifacts in digital form. Like a paper library, we provide free access to researchers, historians, scholars, and the general public.

They have a Live Music Archive with over 34,000 live shows by over 1900 artists. Awesome!

I’ve owned and used both Macs and PCs. I love the Mac brand. The machines look great. The GUI is slick. Steve Jobs is cool. Their stock price is way up. Why do I still like PCs better? I have designer friends that will fight over dissing a Mac. I ask them, “Have you ever used a PC long enough to be comfortable with one?” “No”, they reply. Such loyalty. If it weren’t for font availability and compatibility, and this passionate loyalty, Macs would not exist today. Since the Intel PIII processor, PCs do graphics as just well. 

I'll admit Microsoft does make some really clunky GUIs for some of their software. Ever use PowerPoint, or for heaven's sake Visio?

Now everybody is excited that Macs can run Windows. Why is that such good news if the Mac OS is superior to Windows as Macs pundits tout? Could it be that deep down Macs lovers are tired of being the minority?

Can people finally have their cake and eat it too? Imagine a cool guy at Starbucks on his Mac laptop wearing his headphones. The stereotype is creative, iTunes loving, individualist. Further investigation reveals he is running Windows and listening to some right-wing podcast while doing his taxes. What is happening?

My prediction is the Macs OS will become another OS one can run on their Dell. Open Type fonts will take over. Steve Jobs has a coronary and people will be sitting around remembering the good old days when they lost four hours of beautiful design work because their Mac crashed again.

It’s tax time. I think I’ll buy a Mac laptop and a cappuccino, but only if I get one on sale.

Top 6 domains in terms of page-views in February 2006 according to Media Metrix were: 1) Yahoo, 2) MySpace, 3) MSN, 4) Ebay, 5) Google, and 6) Hotmail.

4 of the top 6 sites (MySpace, MSN, Ebay and Hotmail) run on IIS and Windows.

Linux and Apache may have market share, but enterprise, mission-critical sites rely on Microsoft

Source: Scott Guthrie

http://www.metacafe.com/

I'm new to blogging and just found this. Cool.

Technorati

Currently tracking 31.9 million sites and 2.2 billion links, Technorati is the authority on what's going on in the world of weblogs. Technorati is a real-time search engine that keeps track of what is going on in the blogosphere — the world of weblogs.

The St. Louis Web Developers Organization has an annual awards show. I am please to announce that a site I created won second place for Best Non-Profit Site. The site is the Walter C. Richards Collection, an online gallery of photography from the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair. It is part of the Webster Groves Historical Society's site and also included in the Missouri State Libraries Digitized Collections database and ViruallyMissouri.org. Thanks for the recognition.

I looked at the other winners and I have to say the work this year was very average. This organization has lost traction in the community the last couple of years and the best work was not entered - what a shame. It's nice to have strong industry communities. Perhaps it will come around.

I had been involved with a similar group, the Not Just An Art Director's Club. It was difficult to get people to help run it and it fell by the wayside. Small organizations are hard to sustain. It's always a few core people that keep them going and they get burned out.

Blogs, blogs, blogs everywhere. So on the bandwagon I jump. Jim Coudal, of Coudal Partners convinced me; not personally, but with his site and commentary.

I have been writing a bit lately, so this will be my testing grounds. I plan on publishing professional ideas and information on web development and project management, my areas of expertise, and sharing good stuff I find around the web.