I’m heading off to South America for four weeks this Sunday and thought I’d pose two questions to you while I’m gone and for me to pick up on once I’m back from July 17th:
Please be as specific as possible!
I’ve been a little quiet on the blogging front here lately – been hard at work on a number of blog redesigns for people including:
One of the projects I’ve been working on recently, Pulse, has launched! It’s what online marketing firm Names@Work is calling the first networked book. On the same day that the book hit the shelves of stores, the book began becoming available via its blog.
Never have time to read books these days? The book has been broken up into small pieces for you to read twice each day via RSS or email. If you discover the blog later, you don’t have to feel overwhelmed catching up – you can receive a time-delay feed and start reading from the beginning, twice a day too.
There’s also a chance for you to comment or make corrections and influence later editions or follow-up books. The text is, like other blogs, highly linked out to related blogs and other sites.
Pulse is a ground-breaking new application of blogging and I enjoyed working on the site.
Lately I’ve been finding inspiration over at Screenblog – a collection of screenshots by Thomas Marban and HOW magazine’s gorgeous design annual. New York Times’ redesign is a beautiful example of a webpage which feels like a newspaper which feels like a blog. It’s really easy to get insular with blog design and it’s wonderful to see designers like Jon Hicks bucking the standard “Web 2.0 design” and forging a new retro-feel logo.
If you’re a designer or a blogger, where do you get your design inspiration from?
I’m an advocate for less blog clutter and one thing I’ve been noticing lately is that more and more clients and blogs in general are showing a tonne of social bookmarking icons. If you’re using WordPress, there’s a really nice and easy-to-use plugin called Sociable which does the trick. And if you’re wondering about what are the social bookmarking sites out there, I haven’t heard of some of the 25 sites Sociable gives you the options of showing (with another 25 or so on the way!).
At one point I had an “Add to delicious” (text) link on my blog but I removed it.
Why?
For the casual visitor to my site who may have come from a search engine, someone who doesn’t know what delicious is (and if you find that hard to believe, you’re mixing with a select group of people) an “Add to delicious” is meaningless and even sounds ridiculous.
For visitors who use delicious, they’ll probably have a bookmarklet (button they installed in their browser’s toolbar) which does this for them. You could argue that encouraging them to bookmark it helps your site get more traffic. On the other hand, if you’re writing such good posts they want to refer back to, they’re going to bookmark it somehow.
Having a tonne of icons under each post can clutter up your site (especially if you go for the default of showing all the icons) and is only meaningful to people who use those sites.
I was reminded to post this after reading wg’s post the other day. Andreas agrees and says the new social bookmarking icons are like the buttons for site metadata craze.
Do you find social bookmarking icons helpful? Is there a place for them? Are they being overused (already)?
I’ve been keeping myself busy working on a number of sites lately. These include:
In my opinion, the single-most important personal attribute that you can have if you are working in any field of tech support (this includes web designers who interact directly with clients) is approachability.
I can’t stress this belief of mine enough. I remember what it’s like asking for help and being made to feel so small and stupid and useless because someone more knowledgable than me talked down to me and couldn’t be bothered pointing me in the right direction – even if they didn’t have time to explain everything in detail. I also remember what it’s like having burning questions but feeling too afraid to ask someone for help. People have enough barriers to getting going with technology (their own personal fears, inexperience, lack of knowledge) without people in tech support adding to them in any way.
I was thinking about this today because I read Smiley Cat’s experience of being flamed on a forum when asking for help. Unfortunately this experience is far too common.
One of my personal aims is to work hard on being an approachable web designer. I’m not saying I get it right all the time – I’m human – sometimes I answer queries when I’m tired and should probably wait until morning. Sometimes I misunderstand the question. Sometimes I don’t know the answer to the question. Sometimes I get frustrated and let it show in my communications. But I try and remember to remember what it’s like when you’re the one needing help.
A friendly (short) helpful reply or pointer to a site of help can go a long way.
Elsewhere: 
