We were hired by Dan Colman to recode the header for the WordPress blog, Open Culture.

“Open Culture brings together high-quality cultural & educational media for the worldwide lifelong learning community. Web 2.0 has given us great amounts of intelligent audio and video. It’s all free. It’s all enriching. But it’s also scattered across the web, and not easy to find. [Their] whole mission is to centralize this content, curate it, and give you access to this high quality content whenever and wherever you want it. Free audio books, free university courses, free movies, free language lessons and other enriching content — it’s all here.”

The new header makes better use of visual space as well as giving easier access to important links on the top of every page. Even though changes may seem small, improved usability and better use of screen real estate can go a long way.

Old Header:

New Header:

The design and original development for the theme were created by Rolling Orange.

Check out the new design and have a look at Open Culture.

This past weekend we launched the redesign of our website webdev2.0. With the new design we wanted to address certain issues and improve upon the existing design. We kept the same color palette and used a very similar layout.

First off we wanted better social networking integration. We put the links to Twitter, Facebook, RSS Feed, and newsletter in the header and footer so it would show up on every page and easy for our readers. We also have the Feedburner reader count near the title of every page. On the website profile pages we used the SexyBookmarks plug-in for WordPress and each page has a Facebook fan box and Twitter widget.

The second issue we wanted to address was placement of ads. We wanted consistent placement that was above the fold, but we didn’t want them to be overly intrusive. We’ve also reduced the number of ads to 3 per page.

We wanted to show more competitors for each site. We now show 9 instead of 3.

For the front page, we wanted to highlight the highest rated sites. On the previous site it was in the sidebar on the individual pages. We think promotion to the front page will showcase the highest rated sites better and it should get more views on that page.

We’ve also included our latest blog posts in the footer of every page and we hope to use that feature of the site more often. In the old site it was mostly hidden away.

So how did we do? Do you like the new design? What could we do to improve the site? Take a look at the site and let us know. We look forward to hearing from you.

Parallels Desktop 5 for Mac was released this week and I was eager to see if there was a big improvement over previous versions.  We’re an all Mac shop and we primarily use Windows for testing purposes.  Our test machines consist of a Windows XP environment with IE6 and now Windows 7 with IE7/IE8 and the latest version of Firefox.  There are no additional programs installed in those environments.  Since I don’t use Windows all that often since Apple has transitioned to Intel machines I’ve used every version of Parallels.  Ideally I’d like to keep a virtual machine running at all times for easy toggling and real-time testing while developing sites.

The problem with doing this is it tends to cause my computers to run extremely slow.  I don’t have a Mac Pro, but I do have a variety the latest MacBooks, MacBook Pros, iMacs, and Mac Minis.  All of which are pretty modern with the latest Core 2 Duo processors and maxed out RAM (usually 4GB).  On a typical development setup I’ll usually have Mail.app, Tweetie, Adium, Skype, Webkit, Evernote, iCal, iTunes, Coda, and YummyFTP.  I’ll also occasionally have Firefox, Photoshop, Navicat, Versions, and Pages open depending on the project.  All of these programs run pretty well on any of the setups above.  When I add Parallels or VMWare Fusion to the mix everything comes to a halt.  I realize I’m running a lot of programs and running an additional operating system might be asking too much.  With that being said it’s really a vanilla install of Windows with Firefox and no additional programs running at startup.  With machines with only 2GB of RAM like my MacBook Air I won’t attempt launching the VM even when I’m not running any of the usual programs.

Previous versions of Parallels it eventually lead me to install Windows 7 on a Mac Mini via Bootcamp.  I was lucky enough to test Windows 7 though all the beta stages and I was able to test development on the new operating system before it was released last week.  The Bootcamp environment was obviously much better and it’s expected since I’m running one operating system instead of two.  It got me thinking is it worth it buying Parallels year after year or am I better of just using Bootcamp or even buying a cheap PC with some version of Windows 7.  When I’m developing offsite at a client location, I like to have a VM on the machine to test and having an additional PC isn’t really an option.

Now Parallels Desktop 5 is out and I’ve downloaded the trial and upgraded my two virtual machines.  It still runs a little slow for my liking to use as a full-time open application, but once it’s up and running it seems to work well even with the other applications open.  Boot up and shut down still seem pretty slow.  If I do use Parallels I’ll probably keep the VM open throughout the development session.  I’ll have to work with it more, before making a decision.

Have you been using the new version and what are your opinions on it?  Do you have any suggestions on setting the VM up better to improve performance?

Firescope is a Firefox add-on that allows you to search HTML and CSS reference material directory from Firebug.

After installing you will see a Reference tab in Firebug. From there you can search for HTML Elements, HTML Attributes, and CSS Properties. It shows you what the element is and also it’s compatibility in Internet Explorer 7, Firefox 3, Safari 3, and Opera 9.

It’s a pretty simple add-on, but works as intended. For beginning developers I can see it helping quite a bit and for advanced developers as the HTML spec changes it will give a quick view of what works and what doesn’t.

Starting to use CSS3 techniques that degrade gracefully in older browsers will help design transition into the future. As of right now using these techniques in a design is a secondary thing as opposed to using it for the crucial look and feel of the website. Smashing Magazine has some great tips of including a little bit of CSS3 into designs and worth a look.

Even though the Microsoft servers were down part of the day on Friday, I was lucky enough to download the Windows 7 Public Beta and install it on a dedicated test machine. Being a web developer, I was interested in seeing if there would be any rendering differences across browsers as opposed to the machine performing better than Vista. I’ve never really had any problems with Vista. My primary development machines are running Mac OS X and I have a single machine running Windows on Boot Camp for testing IE7/IE8, Firefox, Safari, Opera, and Chrome. For the most part we follow Yahoo’s graded browser support. However, we’ve dropped support for IE6 and most clients are okay with that as long as it works in IE7 and IE8. If a client really wants IE6 compatibility, we don’t have an issue supporting it, but at the request of the client.

Safari is really the only browser across platforms PC and Mac that visually looks equivalent. Most of the issues I had seen in the past had been due to things like anti-aliasing. While most clients aren’t that critical on the look, they do question why it does look different on PC platforms vs. Mac platforms. Most people just want it to look and function pretty similar in all the browsers. While you can’t compare IE across operating system platforms, you can compare Firefox and Safari. You can definitely see a difference in Firefox on the PC platform vs Mac and the look in Firefox on PC more closely matches IE8. Some clients like consistent looks of buttons for form elements, and until only pretty recently were developers able to skin those buttons without having to jump through hoops.

When comparing Windows 7 and Vista, I didn’t notice any differences in how things looked. I’ve been testing in IE8 on Vista for a little while, so I’ve already adapted some of the issues with that. I think the multiple browsers are finally starting to converge to standards. It’s not perfect by far and still plenty of hacks in the CSS, but we’re definitely in a much better place than we were years ago. It’s refreshing to see and I hope progress continues on the matter. If you are interested in upgrading your test machine to Windows 7 I have yet to see any issues.

The Olympic Games have started and it’s been a pretty good show so far.  There’s a lot of events, and I like to follow certain sports, but I can’t really stay glued in front of the TV on several channels throughout the entire day.  I don’t think clients would be very happy.  I do like to check out their websites to keep up with the latest standings and results.  For as long as I can remember using Olympic websites they’ve all been pretty good.

They offer the overall package: good design, good user interface, and best of all good functionality.  I’m able to find what I need in a pretty effective manner.  It’s nice to see that over the course of many years, even larger sites have transitioned into XHTML/CSS.  It’s been a long process, but I think many companies and organizations have seen the benefit.

NBC’s Olympic website does a good job as well.  I think people put more time into websites that will see a lot of traffic in bursts.  Of course these websites probably get the bulk of their traffic hit during times like this so it’s a good chance to shine in front of a large audience.

Well, that’s all I really have.  Do you like the Olympic sites or do you think some things could be improved?

There was a post on TechCrunch yesterday regarding MySpace and Facebook’s inability to penetrate into a market like Japan.  In the post it says it took a long time for translation (Internationalization) to happen, but more importantly the site that works here in the US market isn’t catered to that of another global market.

With my clients now, it has become important to build sites with global aspects in mind.  Previously, clients just wanted an English based site, which for most businesses based in the US, is probably just fine.  For more complex projects like social networking, developing the site with this in mind early makes for a much easier task than trying to do it later.  This was seen by how long it took Facebook to get up to speed.  Translations take a long time so knowing what you want to do in the beginning can be a great help.

As for Localization this is a little bit harder.  There’s a lot more research that needs to take place in order for your site to look and feel just right for your target audience.

So the terminology Localization (L10n) and Internationalization (I18n) gets mixed up at times and people believe them to be the same thing.  In general clients think Localization is your website translated into another language so that the target country can understand the content. This is actually part of Internationalization. Internationalization covers language, number formatting, dates, times, currency, etc. Localization deals with catering the site to the target market. An example of this may be a picture of the Golden Gate Bridge here in America, but using a graphic of the Great Wall in China.

Overall, I think it’s great that people are looking to expand their site to different markets.  It’s also good that clients see that they want to do this up front which makes it a lot easier.  Don’t get me wrong though, the way we design sites, we can always do the translation after the project is complete, it just always seems to be planned better knowing beforehand.

Apple released the iTunes App Store last week for the iPhone and iPod Touch and I’ve spent some of the weekend using a variety of applications.  For the most part all of the applications run better than their web application counterparts which is expected.  Some of the applications are lacking features, but I’m sure as time progresses those features will be added and they will become complete miniturized versions of their desktop web based applications.

For a few months now I’ve been contemplating jumping into iPhone applications.  I don’t have any Mac OS X desktop experience.  I do have experience in several programming languages both computer and web based.  I’m thinking that this platform would be something worth looking into.  With all the lines in front of the Apple Stores each product launch, I see this platform being just as popular as the iPod.

I did apply for the program and was initially rejected.  I recieved a letter from Apple recently stating I can now join the program.  I’m sure all the other developers that applied were notified as well.  I think it’s going to take a lot of research, development, and testing and hopefully I have the time to take on the challenge.

I see it much more fulfilling to create native applications over the web applications for this platform.  Sure you are limited to the specific platform of Mac OS X for the iPhone, but I think that platform will grow much larger than other manufacturers we see today.

If I start dedicating more time and the company moves more into this sort of development, I’ll be sure to post.  Until then back to web development.

I’ve really gotten into Twitter lately and I’ve been able to incorporate it into my daily life as well as integrated into many of my blogs and websites.  I think it’s a great idea and a great service, but in terms of reliability not so great.  I’m hoping that their new investments will really help out the service because I think it brings a great deal of value to my sites as well as sites of others.

Recently since Twitter has been down, it’s slowed a lot of my websites down.  The connection needs to timeout and this can make a website seem extremely slow.  I suppose I could cache results more often, but that defeats the whole idea of Twitter where you want to know what’s going on right now.

I’ve read articles saying that the platform wasn’t really developed with scalability in mind and that they are looking to develop the system using a different architecture.

I think a lot of people don’t take this into consideration.  When I develop websites for clients many people don’t take that into consideration.  Sure if you are a small business with little website traffic or you have a small blog with a few writers it probably doesn’t make a difference.  If you are trying to build the next best social network however you need to consider it now or pay the consequences later.  You could always neglect it now, but look to change that in the future.  You would need to make sure that you do take care of it before you get as big as something like Twitter.

Now it’s a huge task for them since they have a ton of users using it all the time and they are looking to build reliability into a system thats already developed and running.  I hope they have the time and money to fix those issues because it really is a great service.  It would be a shame if I had to remove it from my sites completely.