July 16, 2008
Facebook added a “thumbs up” and “thumbs down” beneath their advertisement blocks this week. As a user, this is great because I can hit thumbs down on the singles/gay ads I keep seeing (even though I’m listed as interested in Women) and hit thumbs up on technology/advertising ads that I actually dig.
Moreover, as a publisher, being able to serve your ads to someone who actually gives a damn will be worth its weight in gold. Relevancy is just about as big a keyword as you hear these days. And its not surprising, considering how much information I (and other web consumers) are bombarded with daily. To get a user to click your ad in their inbox or on a banner is all about relevance.
With these tiny buttons, Facebook is taking a huge step on its path to owning the social advertising sector.
June 10, 2008
I’ve been a proponent of steadily phasing out IE6 support but too many of my clients (and their at-home usability testers, hah) have IE6 inadvertently installed on their machines. You don’t know how many times I walk a client or friend through Help > About Internet Explorer and ask them to read me the version number and I was shocked to hear that they were still using IE6. “You should download Firefox or the latest IE 7.0 if you must,” I’d repeat again. A few years ago, IE6 users had more reason to gripe– it was installed on most machines at their workplace (businesses who’s windfall profits in the 90’s left their employees on Win98 machines with the latest in browsing technoloy; IE6!)
But it’s no longer the nineties, and after Facebook started recommending IE7 to IE6 users, Apple recently dropped it entirely for MobileMe service and others my ears have started perking up. I mean, Microsoft realease IE7 as a “high priority update” for Windows XP users, so that an automatic update was likely done on millions of machines. Continue reading ‘Time To Drop Designing for IE6?’
March 27, 2008
This lesson is geared toward a small business owner who has a web presence and a Google account. You can add a floating, ever-present Google Talk chatback badge to your site to your site in minutes that will let your website visitors ask you any questions they might have while surfing your website. Continue reading ‘Add A Google Talk chatback badge to your site!’
January 02, 2008
I’ve just recently had to convert an existing website into a Wordpress site for a client. The good news was that on the whole, they wanted their existing site design to stay as close as possible while giving them the ability to add news, images and videos to their website without destroying the look and feel of the website. Thankfully, with the old design in place (albeit using tables for layout) I saved hours of creative and design time. Here’s the original and the overhaul I did. I cut down the page size by 50% and reduced the size of images and calls to the server by 50% as well. And I was finished in about 6 hours.
My theme development for clients used to be a pretty exhaustive process. For each project I’d start with a fresh install of Wordpress and hack up a theme’s PHP pages till it was tailored to fit. I’d go in and add classes and id’s on-the-fly during my CSS development. Adding and updating id’s and classes for the existing theme’s structure took needless time.
That was until I met Sandbox. Sandbox is billed as the themer’s theme. But its really a theme for CSS designers. Through some inventive manipulation of the code using some PHP functions, the authors have managed to add semantic CSS classes to almost every essential element for Wordpress. You can have different styles based on page, author, date, category… you name it. Just by putting classes on the BODY tag of the generated XHTML unleashes powerful design options.
Imagine… without and manipulation to the theme code itself you can do any of the following with just CSS:
- Hide unrelevant content based on page, post, category, etc…
- Improve your site’s print stylesheet to display print-worthy content
- Use images for your dates
- Make a “day” and “night” version of your site.
- Use custom backgrounds or graphical titles based on a posts’ category
- Use different colors for links, background and titles on your site based on the page or category.
I’ll keep going… in the meantime you need to go and preview the Sandbox theme and then get your hands dirty with it. You’ll feel like a kid in a sandbox again.
