Posted: Tue 14 March, 2006 | Author: Lyle | Filed under: D4D™, Geeky, Thinking About..., Web Development |
Over the weekend, Pete pointed out a piece about “mystery” navigation on websites that doesn’t tell people where they’re heading. He suggested it might be rather relevant to me, seeing as d4d™ does exactly that. (And I recently discovered that the rollovers for showing where you’re going when the mouse hovers over the button doesn’t actually work in IE – I’d always kind of assumed it did, and thus hadn’t tested it. Mea culpa)
Anyway, it’s something that I started off as a project on here, something where I was interested to see how people used it. Initially it actually had the look of buttons – using nasty Javascript rollovers and images – where you only knew where you were going once the mouse was already over the button. But it was ugly, so when I went over to CSS for the main bit of the site, I just kept it with text but still on the same theory, not knowing where you were going ’til the mouse was over the button.
You see, my theory is that most people actually navigate based on position, rather than necessarily reading the button that tells them where they’re going. (And yes, I realise there’s a fallacy to this for first time visitors – just bear with me, OK?) I’ve worked on sites where the navigation was truly dynamic, and altered itself so that the “most used” buttons for user ended up at the top of the navigation tree (Man, you should’ve seen the database behind that bugger) and so the nav was different for every regular user, and also changed as you used it.
However, it turned out people hated this – about 75% of the regular users would already have their mouse pointing at the place on the screen that held the button for where they wanted to go, and when that changed, it annoyed them. It’s the same kind of theory that annoys people when supermarkets change the shelf layout, or store position for certain items. People like patterns. People stick to patterns (for the most part) and thus reinforce those patterns.
So d4d™ went the other way – if you knew where you were going, it didn’t matter what the button said – and in fact it could say nothing at all. In many ways it’s an experiment that’s worked – but it’s also one I wouldn’t put onto a commercial site I was doing. When it’s commercial, you really pretty much have to make sure you’re open to everyone, with a particular focus on the first-time visitor. If they don’t like what they see, or find it hard to get round, then they won’t become a repeat visitor.
(I’ve currently also been trying to persuade work about this one, that dynamic nav might sound cool and look cool, but long-term it pisses people off and is epically counter-productive)
Posted: Mon 27 February, 2006 | Author: Lyle | Filed under: Own Business, Thinking About..., Work-related |
Gordon made a comment recently that made me think a bit. Basically, he said that I still appear to have a “contract” view on things, and in a lot of ways I think that’s actually a pretty fair assessment.
I can’t deny, going back to being properly “employed” rather than self-employed has involved a lot of changes for me – some good, some bad. I find it very difficult to switch off the “business” side of my brain, the bit that looks at decisions and can see they’re bad, the bit that doesn’t understand those decisions or why they were made, the bit that makes me want to stand up and shout “For Fuck’s Sake!” in exasperation. Herself keeps on trying to train me in the mantra of “It’s not my problem” and “It’s not my business, it’s theirs, and they can do what they want with it”. It works, but only up to a point. And once that point is passed, I just don’t like seeing a business – whether mine or one that I’m involved in – going tits-up for no good reason. I can’t help it, it seems stupid, and I have little to no tolerance for stupidity.
However, on the plus side, being employed means I get fun stuff like sick pay, and holidays. I don’t have to be responsible for every little thing, for all the paperwork, legislation, hassle, finance, worry, and guff. But it does mean I have to deal with other people’s ideas of how a business should work, rather than my own. And at the moment being employed is part of the plan – it’s easier to get a mortgage when you’re in a “proper” job, rather than going through all the hoops and hurdles they put in for the self-employed : “We want six years of certified accounts” “But I’ve only been in business three years, and my turnover’s less than the Companies House figure that requires certified accounts, so I don’t have them certified” “Tough, we want six years certified accounts”. So it means I’ll most likely remain “employed” for at least this year, while we see what we’re doing, where we’re going, and all that gubbins.
Of course, when you’re self-employed you need to deal with people still, and their ideas of how their business should be run – and in most cases that’s fine, I can handle that because they’re doing it to their own business, not mine. And they’re paying me. And before anyone else says it, yes, I know that in effect that’s the same thing as being employed by someone. But for some reason, in my head it’s just not the same.
Would I want to go back to contracting, necessarily? No. Do I want to go back to being self-employed, and working on my own stuff, for my own business? Hell, yes.
Posted: Sat 25 February, 2006 | Author: Lyle | Filed under: Own Business, Thinking About..., Web Development, Work-related |
In what I suspect may just turn out to be a theme on this stuff, page-widths are quite a bone of contention among web designers.
Basically there are two schools of thought – fixed-width and fluid . Fixed width is pretty self-explanatory – the page is designed to fit a certain size, say 800 pixels, or 1,000 , or another arbitrary figure. In general this is fine – the BBC does it this way, as does the Guardian, and many many others. It’s probably slightly more “standard” for commercial websites than fluid, but not by all that much.
Fluid, on the other hand, still tends to be used primarily on smaller-size (readership-wise) sites, blogs, that kind of thing. Not that it matters, but it’s also my general preference. Fluid widths fill the window, regardless of the size of that window. It doesn’t matter if it’s 600 pixels or 2,400 – the site expands to fit. D4D™ does it – if you’re lucky enough to have a dual-monitor set-up or similar, expand d4d to the full extent of the screen. Look, no blank space. It’ll shrink right down to about 450-490pixels before things break. That’s why I like fluid – because it doesn’t care whether you’re using a monitor that’s only able to use 800 pixels, or whether you’re all the way up at 2,400 (or more) or anywhere in between.
I suspect that a lot of it, as with colour, comes down to personal taste. The BBC site annoys me because it only uses half the window width I’ve got open. The Guardian annoys me for the same reason. However, people who like fixed-width (and again, I wonder if this is related to book or newspaper page widths being fixed, and thus “normal”) argue that if the text isn’t handle correctly in a fluid layout, it can end up being almost unreadable. And in fact I agree with this on occasion – if you’ve got lots of short paragraphs, they can look bloody awful in a fluid layout.
I suspect that the sites I’m currently working on will end up being fluid layouts – I’d rather see the space used for site content, instead of just being blank, wasted space. There’ll be space within the layout, though – I think that it’s the lack of space that can make a fluid layout feel cramped, and so I’ll be using as much space as I can for it.
We’ll see, when it comes to time to test it all out.
Posted: Wed 22 February, 2006 | Author: Lyle | Filed under: D4D™, Own Business, Thinking About..., Web Development, Work-related |
OK, so I was about right in what I figured, regarding website colours and so on.
As with most things – some people like it, some people hate it, and the majority don’t seem to care one way or t’other. Figures.
However, the experiment between “Worksafe” and “Inverted” wasn’t just about people’s reactions to colour, it was also about which produced less eye-strain after a while using it. My personal preference is still for light text on dark backgrounds, whereas most people seem to prefer dark-on-light. I’d guess that’s down to being used to newsprint, and print in general, with black ink on white/whiteish paper.
I do find that after a solid day of looking at a white background to work on, my eyes can be quite tired. It’s the constant “glare” of a predominantly white screen day in, day out, that seems to have an effect. And on that score, light text on a dark background seems to produce less eye-strain, and less headaches.
But from the look of it, on the commercial things I’m doing, I’m going to have to go with dark-on-light as a preference on the colour schemes. I might put in a colour-switcher similar to d4d™ though, just to give people the option (and, of course, so I can have my preferred light-on-dark scheme for working on the bugger x hours a day!)
As always, any thoughts or responses will be greatfully received…
Posted: Tue 21 February, 2006 | Author: Lyle | Filed under: Own Business, Thinking About..., Web Development |
As with yesterday’s “Thinking About…” post, don’t even bother if you’re not interested in web design and so on…
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Posted: Mon 20 February, 2006 | Author: Lyle | Filed under: Own Business, Thinking About..., Web Development |
DISCLAIMER : If you’re not interested in web design/ development and some of my thoughts and plans regarding it over the next few months, don’t even bother clicking on the “more” link underneath – you’d just be bored!
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Posted: Sun 19 February, 2006 | Author: Lyle | Filed under: D4D™, Thinking About... |
Just as a bit of slightly advanced warning, as of tomorrow I’m going to be starting to do a string of “Thinking About…” posts. They’re based around web development and the movement of my own business plans, and as such will have their own “thinking about…” category.
As time goes on the theme will probably diversify a fair bit, but for now it’s going to be primarily about web development and business.
Whether they’re interesting or not is something that remains to be seen…