The NC State women (4) play UConn (1) at 7:00 pm tomorrow night (that’s Mountain time). Go Pack.
Archive for March, 2007
Last Friday I met with the owners of my latest site design, C and T Iris Patch, for a launch meeting. It went really nicely. I like it when clients are gung-ho to learn something new, and enthusiastic about the fact that I try to use applications that make it as easy as possible for them to conduct their business.
In this case, I used OptionCart for their 3000+ item catalog, with the Mal’s E-commerce backend. I’ve talked about both before. I really can’t say enough about OptionCart – I love it because you can drop it into any existing HTML or PHP-based site using includes and it works. It looks pretty good right out of the box, but with a minimum of customization it blends right in with the look and feel of the site in general.
The admin panel for OptionCart is very simple, compared to other products like X-Cart or ZenCart. It’s intuitive, doesn’t have that many functions, but that isn’t necessarily a bad thing.
This client in particular is selling a product without a lot of options associated with it (i.e., the flowers don’t come in multiple-sized containers) and just needs an easy way to manage selling online. OptionCart is perfectly suited to a catalog that’s very robust, works great but doesn’t have a lot of bells and whistles. Clients are comfortable with it because it has an intuitive interface and the choices on what to do are well-defined and fairly obvious.
In short, it’s a cart that makes the administration end of things easy to deal with and kind of ‘invisible’ – it works without you being aware of it most of the time. That’s my favorite kind of website functionality.
I was directed to this really nice CSS-based form by a colleague a few weeks ago and I’ve used it in three sites so far. I have in the past built a number of forms but this one looks nicer; I like that it provides an example of just about every type of input field you might need. Highly recommended.
I just read one fricking fantastic post by Andy Rutledge on web quality.
This is great – it defines the ongoing battle between designers who support web standards, and those who ignore/shun/berate them, as basically being a matter of semantics. That is, web standards are not about standardization or compliance, as some would maintain; web standards are really about the quality of web craft. ‘Standard’ is a high level of quality to strive for, not the confining destroyer of uniqueness in design that some would have us believe.
This is so simple and really gets to the heart of the matter, but I never thought of explaining it this way.
Andy also talks about the misuse of the search engines. Search engines being a completely essential tool for correctly organizing all that information on the web and being able to call it up – correctly – when that information is sought – this is the purpose of a search engine; like an enormous virtual card catalog. Andy says that it’s “irresponsible to hinder this worthy task” by viewing the search engines as only things to be manipulated or exploited for commercial or personal gain.
I highly recommend that all the web designers I know go read this article. Quality is what being a professional is all about!
I just got the new issue of BusinessWeek’s SmallBiz magazine and read “No Geeks Required.” This article is all about those inexpensive, pay-by-the-month build-it-yourself websites offered by the likes of Yahoo, MSN, Homestead and a few others.
While small business owners may feel they’re getting a good deal by developing their own sites using these services rather than paying a professional web designer, what happens after their site launches?
Do any of those services consider the importance of optimizing sites for better free, not paid, search engine results? Do they stress the importance of adding fresh content regularly, or of making a site more accessible?
If a website can’t be easily found, or it shuts out potential customers, it’s not really benefiting a business, no matter how easy it was to build. The advice of a good web designer can contribute greatly toward helping a site become successful in the long run – especially after the launch.
And as far as charging super-high prices for the simplest of sites, or taking a month to make a simple edit to a site, that’s just an unfortunate choice of designer, in my opinion. I don’t do that and I know plenty of other professionals who don’t do it either.
I’m using an old (2002-2003?) Dell Dimension 2400 as my main work machine in lieu of my laptop. About a month ago, something started making a lot of noise, and through some investigation it seemed to be the PSU.
I bought a new one, a Thermaltake that was highly recommended on Newegg. I installed it and all was blissful silence – everything was nice and quiet.
The old PSU was the stock Dell, I think 250w, while the new one was 430w. Now I’m wondering if the new generated more heat than the old one? The 2400 case is very tight with little room for anything, and I have all the PCI slots (all three of them) filled with a wireless network card, NVidia GeForce 5200 graphics card, and Soundblaster Audigy card that I added about two months ago.
I also have two hard drives running in this case. It has 1g of RAM (also maxed out).
Monday the PSU (the new one) started making noise. All of my apps started really slowing down. Yesterday my computer shut down and checking the error log, I had a ‘thermal event’ associated with the CPU fan.
So… I have to get a new fan from Dell (which takes a week to ship). I put the old PSU back in this machine, it’s at least quieter than the new one, which I suspect is fried.
But I don’t know what’s going on. The CPU fan I’m replacing sounds fine, no bearing issues. A local computer guy checked it and said so too, but the only alternatives are (1) fried leads, requiring a new motherboard or (2) a fried processor.
Is the case overheating from the components I’ve installed? Could the extra heat from the bigger PSU caused the CPU fan to die? I just don’t know… I’m so tempted to just cancel the fan order, purchase a case and new motherboard with processors and have done with this machine. But I don’t know… I hate having to wait a week.
I’m now sitting here with the case open and a floor fan blowing air through it. It sounds like a wind tunnel in here; I’m just backing off the work I’ve done this week so I can restore it on my laptop while I wait for the fan that I don’t think is going to solve the problem.
I just wish I knew whether it’s the motherboard or not – that would save me at least the wondering about it until next week.
