Digital Photography School has a great post on 13 Lessons to Teach Your Child About Digital Photography that apply to anyone interested in learning more about photography. My favorite lessons include…
Of course how old your child is and their interest in photography depends on how deeply you can get into these subjects.
The other day I logged into my mortgage company’s site to check what we owed on our house that we are selling. I probably haven’t logged into that site in a year or two. The next day I had phone call from my mortgage company checking to see if everything was OK and if I had any questions. I have never, ever had a phone call from my mortgage company before. Not, when they bought my mortgage, not ever.
So, do you think they trigger a phone call whenever someone logs in for the first time in a while? Are they trying to protect their business and make sure I don’t jump mortgage companies? I guess it could have been a coincidence, but probably not.
Innovator’s and entrepreneurs need to follow Google’s advice…
“At Google, we really focus on failing wisely,” said Matt Glotzbach, Google Enterprise’s product management director, at the Interop New York conference. “There is no penalty for failure. In fact we encourage it because if you’re not failing it means you’re probably not trying.”
One of the keys to good web design is designing for accessibility. That is making your site easy to use for those with different kinds of limitations: an old computer/web browser, vision problems or even color issues. The designer putting himself in the place of the person with the accessibility issue is the key to solving accessibility issues. For many designers, color issues is difficult to test for because it is hard to put yourself in the users shoes (or vision as it may be). Jeffrey Zeldman suggests two cool tools for testing for color issues. I’ve often used this color scheme generator which has a drop down to illustrate your selection as seen by users with different color issues.
Since the beginning of the web, web designers have continually worried about the fold and fought the fold. The fold is the mythical line that denotes what the user sees when they first visit a web site and what the user does not see (below the fold). (I believe the fold concept comes from newspaper design where designers had to make sure compelling photos and headlines were placed above the fold to drive single copy sales of newspapers placed in newspaper racks.) Content owners and advertisers constantly argue and harass web designers for placement above the fold to ensure that their content is seen.
Clicktale blog has exploded the myth of the fold with some of their recent research. Their research shows that basically the same percentage of page views will reach the middle of a web page regardless of the actual page height in pixels and Almost identical percentages of page views (15%-20%) reach the page bottom regardless of page height.
While you’re pondering the effect the fold disappearing has on your website you might want to investigate ClickTale’s Heatmaps.
Over the years, I’ve written my own customized CMS running off a MS SQL or Access DB and vbscript and played around with a quite a few open source CMSes that were mostly one-offs of blogging platforms. I would always revert to writing my own customized versions because the open source ones were buggy and too hard for the average user to use.
Lately, I have found a couple of open source CMS options that might actually make the cut. First, I’ve used WordPress for a new site that I developed with a friend for our church. WordPress has a great user community that has developed a ton of templates and plug-ins that really allow you to customize WordPress as much as you want. To get started customizing a WordPress site you do have to know some CSS and HTML and be able to FTP things up to a server, but posting new pages or posts on WordPress is a breeze.
I’ve also been exploring TextPattern this weekend. I’ve seen a lot of web designers that I respect recommending it at as their CMS of choice for small to medium sites. I did a test install on one my hosting accounts of TextPattern and it was super easy to get running and their coding/templating requirements look super easy to add textpattern content to templates that you’ve already developed. I plan on playing around with it more and trying to find a project that I can use it on.
The Fayetteville, Arkansas City Councilnow has a blogspot blog where they are posting the agenda’s for the upcoming city council meetings. I think they are looking for citizens to comment on the different parts of the agenda, but there are no comments so far. We’ll have to check back and see if the citizen’s of Fayetteville get involved.
Since I wielded the shovel quiet a few years ago, I haven’t understood why a newspaper hasn’t stood up and said online news is a different business from print newspaper and shouldn’t require us shoveling the entire print contents on to the web site early every morning. Well, Howard Owen has said it in an effort to change the culture of the newsroom and he didn’t say it to try to save the print circulation). Then, he describes how a newspaper would like without the shovelware. My favorite points include…
Wouldn’t that be a fun newspaper to read and a fun newspaper to work for?
NYTimes.com general manager, Vivian Schiller, reports that their slide show section has taken off accounting for 10 percent of their overall August traffic.
Note to self: Add video AND slide shows to the site.
Which one do you think will be easier to produce?