Well I finally sat down this afternoon and learned how to integrate Wordpress into an existing website.

I followed Jonathan Wold’s tutorial - it’s pretty good, and got me far enough into the process that I understood how to finish it myself.  You can see the results here; I’m not quite done as of this afternoon, but it should be finished up in the next few hours (or days depending on my workload)…

I found a nice online color tool today - a full Pantone chart with RGB and HTML conversions.

I’d been hanging around on Meetup.com for my town for about a year, on the ‘waiting for a web design meetup’ and other lists, and a few weeks ago finally decided to bite the bullet and start a group myself (with one other coder as co-organizer).

So… this morning we had our first meeting over breakfast, and it went really well! Only five of the 9 that had RSVP’d yes or maybe showed up, but it was a good group and we had a great time. I just set up the second meeting and hopefully we’ll get a bigger turnout, but I was really pleased with the first one.

As far as Meetup.com, it has its pros and cons. One is that it’s really user-friendly and very simple to manage your group, communicate with everyone, set up meetings and RSVP’s/reminders. It has a few nice features like the message board and polling or profile questions.

The cons are that there aren’t forums - my group is interested in having that so we can post projects for review, post code snippets, book reviews, that kind of thing, and the message board is limited to only the one general topic. Also, that you can’t do anything with the site template, which is what I’d like to get my hands on…

One of our members has started a site on CollectiveX, which is a group/social networking platform, and we’ll be using that for our forums and other things that Meetup.com doesn’t offer. But I think for the time being we’ll keep the Meetup site too, as it really excels within its limited scope: getting people to join and get involved on a basic level. If you’re in the Northern Colorado area, consider joining us.

I met with a potential client last week who’s been trying (without a lot of success yet) to put together a real estate site using one of the ubiquitous do-it-yourself sitebuilder packages on a prominent host.

He asked me point blank: “What can you do for me that’s better than what I can get on (name of ubiquitous host)?”

A very good question. We talked for about an hour, and I answered his questions and just submitted a bid for his project last night. But I thought I would summarize here… (Not in any particular order).

1. Custom websites. I don’t use templates - if you go with a sitebuilder, you’ll be using a template that maybe dozens or hundreds of other sites are also using. If you go with a pro, you should get a totally unique site that’s customized to fit the goals and personality of your own business, not a carbon-copy of someone else’s.
2. Clean code. Sitebuilder applications tend to put out really messy, bloated code. A pro who knows what he/she is doing will write clean, valid code and externalize all those scripts. He/she should also be checking across multiple browsers, testing for accessibility and validating code (IMO) and this isn’t something that probably occurs to most users of sitebuilder apps.
3. (Probably) better rankings. I know that many of those ubiquitous hosts offer SEO tools, and that’s great. But the messy code and sometimes just confusion about using the SEO tools means that websites don’t get optimized the way they should be.
4. No monthly fees. I know that (ubiquitous host) doesn’t charge much, but you generally pay by the month unless you pay up front. When you hire a pro, you pay and you’re done. And yes, pros charge more, but when you pay very little, you tend to get very little.
5. More efficient use of your time. If you own a business, you’re probably a very busy person. Why spend hours or days or weeks working on a website that looks like many others? Hire a professional and get what you really want - something that makes your business look good and helps you establish and improve your relationships with your clients.

All my opinions, but I think they’re valid ones. DIY sites may be okay for personal sites or if you’re just starting out, but eventually moving up to a custom, professionally-built website is a better move for many small businesses.

I’ve tried various clunky fixes for the IE6 PNG transparency problem, but yesterday ran across a wonderful little script from Angus Turnbull (from 2005, but no matter).

I tried it yesterday on a CSS background image and it works like a charm, but ran into some problems today trying to use it on a floated image.

Here’s the thing: when using it for a background image, follow the directions under ‘Transparent Backgrounds’ here and it works perfectly. But when you use it for a foreground image, you have to have a blank .gif file on the server, and you have to edit one line in Angus’ .htc file to point to that blank .gif.

This info is not obvious at all and I was really confused until I read Angus’ page thoroughly. But after loading the blank .gif and editing the iepngfix.htc file, all was well.

This is one of the easier implementations of a PNG fix I’ve seen. It uses the ‘behavior’ property in CSS, a Microsoft-proprietary thing and won’t affect browsers that already support PNG’s correctly.

There’s some really interesting conversation going on about IE8 these days.

• A List Apart article from Aaron Gustafson
  
• A List Apart article from Eric Meyer

Basically, it sounds like Microsoft took a thrashing when it released IE7, an imperfect but much more standards-compliant browser than IE6, and all those sites that had been built or hacked or conditionally commented to make them work properly in IE6 were suddenly ‘broken’ in the eyes of their owners.

Microsoft doesn’t want this to happen again when they release Internet Explorer 8 (even though the changes from IE7 to 8 will be less extensive than from 6 to 7). From what I’ve read (and I admit it’s not a lot), IE8 is going to be quite good. It follows the CSS 2.1 specification closely and sounds very promising!

But what can they really do to prevent ‘breakage’ of older sites built for less-compliant browsers?

Aaron Gustafson puts it this way:

“…We’re really only left with one option for guaranteeing a site we build today will look as good and work as well in five years as it does today: define a list of browser versions that the site was built and tested on, and then require that browser makers implement a way to use legacy rendering and scripting engines to display the site as it was intended—well into the future.”

Meaning that future (presumably better and even more standards-compliant) versions of browsers will be required to include all the old rendering and scripting information to show sites that are keyed to a particular browser version correctly.

So if you have a site that you want to display in IE6’s rendering styles forever (I don’t know why you would, but just for the sake of argument), you could add a metatag that said so. This would mean that the company you built the site for would never have to update it no matter what changes happen in IE down the road. Their site would never appear to have ‘broken’ because it would still render in the non-standard browser as intended.

Personally, I have a problem with this. As a standards advocate and someone who lives and breathes web design, this bothers me. Technology improves and things change.

I know there are many many many many designers who don’t care (or even know much about) about standards. This will probably always be true, and that’s okay for them (it makes us look better). But aren’t you kind of short-changing your clients if you build a site and lock it in to the current version of a browser? What if some great new capability is developed that could just blow your client away - but they can’t have it because that old browser doesn’t support it?

This is just my opinion. But for me, it’s not good enough that a business site that I build worked last year. I want it to work in perpetuity. I like improving my skills and what I can offer my clients. I enjoy being able to validate my code (yes I do). It’s part of being a professional; again, my opinion.

And I think that for a business, adapting to change is important. If you have a website that’s three years old and breaks in IE7, I think you should fork over the funds and time to get it updated. It’s a cost of doing business.

Being able to freeze an older, non-compliant site in time forever is kind of like having your own wayback machine and it seems to run counter to the very reason for being online in the first place… I totally agree with one of Eric Meyer’s statements:

“Thus, as a developer, there’s no need to look beyond the current state of browsers. I can just assume that browsers will always support what I’ve done even if it’s the worst kind of short-sighted, browser-specific, who-needs-standards-anyway type of development possible.”

I’m not entirely convince that this is a terrible move and my opinion might change. But I know that I would not be satisfied to have working websites out there that were functioning on a level three years old.

And, finally, it seems to me that if IE10 is to support all the bugs and sloppy rendering of all the versions of IE that went before it, won’t it be ginormous amount of code? Is this even reasonable? Will it affect the function and speed of a browser (I have no idea).

And if IE starts doing it and finds it works well, will the other browser vendors start doing it too? Although I see less reason, since most other browsers have been closer to compliant for far longer…

Lots to consider on the web development front.

The beginning of the year seems like a great time to get on top of some business issues that have been dragging along more or less unattended to for awhile.

In 2005, when I started my web design business, I wrote a process document that was really a stab in the dark, with tasks pulled from a few books. In 2006 I rewrote it, using information gleamed for the most part from a really good book by Kelly Goto and Emily Cotler - Web ReDesign 2.0: Workflow that Works (2nd Edition) (VOICES)“>Web ReDesign 2.0. This was a really helpful book for me but it’s written for those redesigning existing sites that are a lot bigger than my clients’ sites.

Last weekend I revisited my 2006 version again. It was not bad, but my process has changed as I’ve gotten better at, well, everything. Some parts are not there anymore, or fused into others. I also noticed that there are some things that I was doing early on that I haven’t paid much attention to lately, and that’s not good.

So I rewrote it again, borrowing from the Gogo/Cotler book, a few design articles I’ve read recently, and my own experience. The final document (Red Kite Creative Formal Design Process) is lean, simple to follow, yet thorough, and reflects both what I’m doing well and the things that I need to focus on more closely. Mostly those things are the pre-visuals, like writing a full project plan and wireframing. I sitemap thoroughly, but I don’t wireframe that much. In some cases I should be doing that more.

The process document isn’t a set of rules, but a record of the workflow that works well for me right now. It will continue to change, I’m sure. But I know that if I eventually have a partner or employee, I want this document ready to be used as an outline for the way I develop websites.

1) Make your site more search engine-friendly.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a must, not a ‘maybe,’ if you want your business site to be found in Google. If you have a great-looking site that no one can find, it’s not doing its job.

2) Add a blog or podcast to your site.

If you like to talk (or write) about your business and you’re good at what you do, a blog or podcast may be just the thing. Both of them do one thing very well – they encourage visitors to come back to your site again and again. And they’re so easy to use! (I’m a huge fan of Wordpress). Blogs give you the advantage of adding a new page of fresh content to your site every time you post, while a podcast is like having your very own radio show.

3) Remove a blog from your site.

That might sound odd – but if you have a business blog and haven’t committed the time and effort to post fairly regularly, it’s probably better *not* to have one at all. If your last post was in 2005, consider removing the link to the blog for the time being. It reflects poorly on your company and makes it look like you don’t keep up with things.

4) Write articles about your industry.

Whether you’re a retailer, an architect, or a coach, you have a unique take on your business. Writing articles about it that you can both publish to the many free article syndication sites and post on your own website or blog both establish your expertise and create links back to your site - which Google likes a lot.

5) Give your site a makeover.

If your site is more than a couple of years old, or if it’s never had a facelift, now is the time. A more modern look and feel can give your site new life and make a better first impression. In addition, a redeveloped site can often benefit search engines and human visitors too, with cleaner, leaner code, faster loading times, and easier updating and maintenance.

6) Learn more about your visitors.

Google Analytics is a traffic analysis tool that does much more than just tell you how many people are visiting your site. You can learn, among other things: how much time they spend on each page; what navigation paths they follow through your site; where they come in and leave; what part of the country they’re in; and what links on your home page they’re clicking on. If you use Adwords for PPC marketing you can also learn how much revenue each product on your site is earning and how many have been sold in any given period. Google Analytics is free and easy to use.

7) Break up your content.

Even if you already have a lot of good content on your site, breaking it up into bite-size chunks is always a good way to increase readability. Studies show that people don’t often read websites – they scan them. Think headlines, bullet lists, pull quotes and short paragraphs rather than long uninterrupted text.

(Yes I know this is a lot of uninterrupted text but this isn’t my website. This is for readers, not scanners…)

Change the copyright date.

Don’t forget to change (or have someone change for you) the date on the copyright notice that should be at the bottom of your web pages. No, that won’t help you get more visitors, but it looks unprofessional if you forget to do it!

9) Make the product look great.

If you’re selling products, and the images aren’t that fantastic, consider having them redone by a professional. It makes a big difference in the credibility of your site and gives the buyer more confidence that the product will really meet their needs.

10) Consider video.

If you’re selling a product or provide a service that could benefit from visual instruction, think about having a short how-to video made. They’re easy to post on your website, and can do double-duty for your traffic if you also post them on sites like YouTube or Google Video.