Recently in Web Design Category

Every now and then this happens.

A new colour scheme catches my eye. Some new-fangled idea. Sometimes original, sometimes borrowed. Sometimes frankensteined.

But somehow every time I put together a redesign, I’m hesitant to mix in graphics, as if the addition of images would somehow mar a purely (or mostly) textual design. It’s an unnecessary constraint I place upon myself, but it’s a challenge to create compelling design without any images.

There are many elements I’ve yet to bring back into the site, not to designing mention the template for individual posts. As usual, you’ll have to bear with the construction that’s going on.

Thanks for sticking around.

Really, thanks.

After more than a year of carrying my child, the Ministry of Education website is finally alive.

Quite a few people have come up to me, patted me on the back and said “thank goodness that’s over, huh.” I’m immensely relieved that it’s out because the coordination of a million moving parts wasn’t an easy task at all, but a good website is one that is never done. It grows, evolves, gets better with age.

In the 2 days that it’s been live, I’ve restructured information, tweaked font-sizes for the printer stylesheets, made some things more apparent and some things less so, all based on the feedback I’ve received from people using the site. I’m glad the site is finally free of the encumbrance of the rather immobile content-management system it was chained to.

The best part about the launch thus far has been interacting with real people who use the site. I’ve managed to turn comments, suggestions and complaints into real action on the website, and a number of these users were delighted to see their needs met almost immediately. We’ve been working on fictional personas, and it’s not the same. Now when your users are living, breathing people, the website really lives up to its intended purposes of serving its community.

I’m dog-tired, but in a happy way. It’s been a good week for web standards in Singapore. I gave a talk at Opera Software’s Web Standards Conference alongside mobile web extraordinaire Michael Smith who fascinated me to no end with what he could do with the Opera Browser.

I’m a believer.

Just a few hours ago we had the first Web Standards Group meetup. It totally rocked. The geek vibe was definitely there. Talent met ideas; I actually had to shoo people out of the auditorium at 10pm.

The question quite a number of people asked was, “so when’s the next meetup?”

I take that as a compliment - that the meetup went well.

Soon as I get my strength back. I promise.

If you’re a regular reader of this blog you’d already know that I’m an advocate of Web Standards. If you’re a web standards nut, or if you’re interested in finding more about web standards, we’re having a meet up.

One of the more awkward tasks at work is having to choose photos for web content because the default CMS template demands one. It is not always easy to depict information pictorially, especially when the visuals are confined to photography available in your media bank.

It’s nice to know the media heavyweights face the same problem.

BBC’s article on “US Iran report branded dishonest” was about how the International Atomic Agency found the US’ report on Iran’s nuclear programme inaccurate. The photo shows a bunch of middle-eastern men dressed in scrubs looking over a silver platter, with the caption “Iran insists its nuclear programme is for peaceful purposes”.

Looks more like glue sniffing to me, but who am I to say anything. There’ve been equally irrelevant photos put up on sites I’ve managed simply because a photo had to be there.

Gamespot redesigns in CSS. Very, very spiffy.

Another reason Microsoft shouldn’t own the universe: MS Word HTML crapola.

Do not, and I repeat do not, arrange your layout in MS Word, then cut and paste the finished layout into the CMS. The ratio of crap to good content MS Word produces when it comes to HTML is, as Shakespeare puts it, “two grains of wheat in two bushels of chaff”.

The words HTML should never have appeared in any menu of MS Word. Why, Bill, must you continue to torment us with bloated coding?

Wow. It’s been 2 years and 2 weeks ago when I tried preaching web standards to the business director or a large local IT solutions company, and failing so miserably it was blogworthy.

Now armed with 2 years more experience but equally naive, I rambled on about how designing in line with web standards streamlined the entire web production process. This time, the shell-shocked victims of my enthusiastic onslaught were my new colleagues.

We’re a small group, and we manage both the internet and intranet of one of the largest organisations in Singapore. We spend a lot of time trying to get content to “look right”, employing all sorts of presentation hacks. Maybe if I slot two <br>s, or &nbsps into the empty table cells. That sorta thing.

The audience makes all the difference. Web standards, till today, is still a hard sell to the businessman. They just want their site up. They don’t really care how you do it. Sure, higher pageranks and faster product development cycles are good, but hardly quantifiable in dollars. In Singapore, an online presence is thought of as little more than a namecard. It’s terribly shortsighted, but we aren’t known to be very forward-thinking a people.

Here, to this audience, web standards offered something very, very prized. Less work, more control. And here in a government organisation, consistency in presentation is paramount. Web standards offer all that. A perfect fit.

I have much to thank God for. And I know that He is telling me to be as, if not more, enthusiastic about my faith as I am about web standards, my Macs or photography. After all, all these mundane details mean nothing if we haven’t found the purpose of life itself.

One of the things I cannot stand about Tomorrow.sg is the manner in which they link to original articles. Instead of hyperlinking phrases like “Brian says” or “In Grace’s article”, the only hyperlink pointing to where you want to go is called “link”, conveniently placed at the end of where they quote the original article. Doesn’t anybody read Jakob Nielsen anymore?

Phrases like “click this” and “link” should never be used as hyperlinks, because they are so utterly lacking in meaning.

You’re at a restaurant and you need the bathroom real bad. Only in this restaurant, instead of a sign saying “Restroom” with an arrow pointing to where you need to go, there’s a sign saying “pathway” with an arrow pointing somewhere. You are expected to use your nose, smell the air, and draw contextually that the sign means to lead you to a stinking loo where you will find the relief you need.

Come on guys. Some of you are in the industry for crying out loud.

Most of us web designer folk know better than to specify obscure fonts in our CSS files. We know that a cocktail of helvetica, verdana, arial, sans-serif ought to hit home on the majority of operating systems out there.

What of Chinese fonts? What’s the standard on those?