When we at webclearly are invited to create a site, the beginning steps involve listening to, and interpreting, and understanding the client’s needs. An ability to cut through the jargon and explain technical details to someone who may know little to nothing about website creation is also helpful.

After we agree on the purpose of the site, and determine the intended audience, we talk about content. Content leads to information architecture which leads to site navigation. The customer usually offers some broad content topics, and then we go a little deeper, looking for patterns and similarities. One way to approach the content issue is to write down major and minor content highlights on index cards. The sorting of the cards can be a great help in figuring out the site’s taxonomy. This taxonomy, or arrangement, of the content into a series of parent-child relationships, leads to a site navigation scheme.

With a good understanding of the navigation, we can begin making suggestions for a site design. This can, and often does, begin with a pencil on paper sketch. Making both us and the customer happy involves an iterative process that can go from the back-of-a-napkin through computer-based sketches to roughing out a basic HTML template. There is usually a lot of reviewing and adjusting, reviewing and adjusting going on in this stage.

When the design has been fleshed out, the coding begins. This is where the “attention to detail” mentioned earlier comes in handy. Computers are good for a great many things, but accepting coding errors is not one of them. It’s a matter of code, check, see a problem, re-code, check, see a different problem. And so on. With several browsers (and their attendant finickiness) and now myriad devices available – from a three inch phone to twenty-seven inch monitors – waiting to show the site, it can be a painstaking process making a website look good in all environments.

But, finally, when both we and the customer are happy with the site, the files are uploaded. The brand new creation joins the millions of other sites out on the web.

There’s more to making a successful site than what I’ve listed here: search engine optimization, making the pages accessible for people with disabilities (what does your site sound like?), programming necessary to make forms work, etc., but we’ll discuss all that, and more, in future entries.

I turned 60 last year and managed to get in about three outings before winter stepped in and I stopped going outside. I shouldn’t call it running, more like walking with the occasional burst of slow running/fast walking. I could manage about a hundred yards of jogging before going back to a walk to catch my breath. I smoked cigarettes for thirty five years before quitting at age 50. Thirty five years of smoking is not overcome in ten years so gasping for breath after a hundred yards of jogging didn’t come as a huge surprise.

Ove the winter I ran once or twice a week on a treadmill until I could manage 15 minutes without stopping. Even then, it wasn’t necessarily shortage of breath or aching legs that stopped me running, it was boredom. That fitness room in my building could really use a television.

When the weather finally improved, I was back outside running/walking the two miles from Van Ness St. in D.C. to Chevy Chase Circle and the two miles back. At least I thought it was two miles until my wife drove it once and came home to inform me it was actually 1.9 miles. I’ve now been doing the onepointfreakingnine miles twice a week for the last six months, and I still have to stop for breath once each way, but it’s getting better. I have this weird need to keep trying until I can get there and back without stopping.

Running outside is rarely boring, there’s so much going on to keep the brain occupied. Avoiding potholes and dogs, watching the traffic lights so I make it across intersections without getting side-swiped, checking out other runners, etc. Something else I’ve started to do is write blog entries in my head while running, hence this entry.

Here’s what I’ve noticed about runners — at least the people running on Connecticut Avenue in Washington, D.C: most of ‘em are skinny and in their 20s. I bet I haven’t seen five people my age in six months. I guess most of my peers are suffering from bad knees (see above). I also never see fat people running. Is that because they used to be heavy but took up running and lost all that weight? Or is it just too difficult to run when overweight? Or have these runners always been skinny, and intend to stay that way? I don’t know the answers, but I wonder why they don’t acknowledge my presence once in a while.

Before today, I’ve had a couple of people notice me while running: one rather elderly lady nodded in my direction as we jogged past each other and the only person to actually say something to me was a late-twenties muscle bound monster who said something along the lines of, ‘Good for you,’ which, I suppose, was a reference to my age and activity. Kids ignore me. Of course, they pretty much ignore me when we’re not running as well. But I thought when two of us partaking in the same pursuit pass each other we would acknowledge the similarity with a nod, or a smile, or even a “hey.”

Then, this morning, two young girls passed me at different times going the other way, one smiled at me, and the other nodded. Made my day, added a little burst to my step and took my mind off my legs and lungs. Thank you ladies.

Lydia and I are starting a business together called webclearly. It’s all about making websites that are simple, accessible, usable, and useful.

“Simple” means sites with logical, understandable, information architecture. A place where you never say, “Where am I, how did I get here, and how do I get back?”

“Accessible” has two meanings, the first is, we pride ourselves on making sites that are understandable to people with physical difficulties, especially those who rely on screen reading software to get information. The second meaning is you won’t need any special software to view the content, you won’t see the ’best viewed in someone else’s browser,’ nonsense (although I’m not sure anyone actually says that anymore, do they?), nor will you  need a monitor set to 1024 pixels for best viewing — our sites are built flexibly to appear at their best regardless of the viewing device.

“Usable” means you’ll understand immediately why the site exists — because we’ll tell you right there on the homepage. You’ll see effective, logical navigation that is repeated on every page so you’ll never get lost, and never be more than one click away from the homepage.

“Useful” is why we’re here. If you have a product or service to offer, then we’ll shout it from the homepage: “Here’s what we have to offer! Here’s how to get some!” 

That’s the ad over with, the details will be in future entries.

DCPL’s catalog is Sirsi/Dynix and they say they’re going to eventually make the code public for you Sirsi users. The catalog searching iPhone app was inevitable, I suppose, but I believe DCPL are the first. Good for them.

Being furloughed for a day means you get to take the day off work, but you don’t get paid. We have been warned of layoffs coming by July, 2009  if not sooner, and that means hundreds of library staff will be gone. Cutbacks are happening everywhere in the government of course, but in the library it means less materials, less people, less hours open, and at least one furlough day. Another furlough before this fiscal year ends on June 30, 2009 wouldn’t surprise me because we keep being told things are worse than first suspected. 

So how did I spend furlough day? I read a book.

Staff can add, modify, and delete events at any time.

There are two views for the month: a calendar view and a list view. The list view seems a little grey and dull, the text would benefit from a little more breathing room. The calendar view shows the whole month at a glance but these fly outs keep, well, flying out every time you mouse over an event. That can get annoying pretty quickly.

We’ve had a handful of complaints from customers (not about fly outs, more about the confusion that change often brings) and, so far, no one has written to say they love it but I suspect that’s par for the course. The “handful” are probably that same group that complains no matter what, and it’s rare when someone takes the time to pass on a compliment.

On my library site though, it’s saving us a lot of work. As I said in an earlier entry, we used to recreate our branch events on age-specific pages. No more, we just link into the Evanced calendar and let it do the work.

]]> http://meanpinball.wordpress.com/2009/01/05/evanced-review/feed/ 0 meanpinball http://meanpinball.wordpress.com/2008/11/17/does-anyone-really-know-what-date-it-is/ http://meanpinball.wordpress.com/2008/11/17/does-anyone-really-know-what-date-it-is/#comments Mon, 17 Nov 2008 21:08:12 +0000 Bob http://meanpinball.wordpress.com/?p=60 ]]> December sees the beginning of a new calendar system for branch events on our Web site. It is a “Classic ASP” program made by Evanced and they are also hosting our version although you can host your own if you have any say in what goes on your servers. The software also allows for customers to book a meeting room. By “book a meeting room,” of course, I mean, they request a room (over the Web) and library staff review their application for appropriateness.

The events part of the calendar allows the customer to search by keyword, date, event type, branch, and age group. The results can be viewed in either list view or calendar view. The opportunity to register online is also available.

The new calendar is forcing some changes in other areas of our site. For years, we’ve had one page each of branch events for the upcoming month for preschoolers, kids, teens, adults and older adults. I’ve long thought that these pages were popular because it was easier to see at a glance the events in chronological order for a particular age group than to work with the intricacies of a calendar’s search feature. These pages are being replaced by a just a single link to let Evanced do the work to provide the same results. In other words, we can make a link that returns all the events for a particular branch in a particular month for a particular age group. Although the old pages were rather labor intensive, they DID provide work for someone, plus our customers seemed to like the pages — well, at least no one ever complained.

The events are initially entered into the Evanced database by library staff so an accurate set of results depends on the staff entering the data correctly but, then again, so does every other database.

I’ll let you know what happens once December arrives.

A friend of mine was a negative stripper. That’s someone who prepares negatives to be burned into plates that eventually go on the printing press. It involved laying a negative piece of film on a light table, covering the negative with a piece of paper and wielding a razor blade back and forth cutting the paper away from the important parts of the negative so light could shine through. The experienced stripper moved that razor blade around pretty darn quickly and often unerringly — it certainly was a talent. Then, along came stripping software, effectively ending the career of a negative stripper — unless you could learn how to use a computer and then figure out the complicated stripping software.

I was a photographer, a photography teacher, a videographer, a desktop publisher, and now a Web site developer. If you are over 40 you’ve probably lived through some career changes as well.

These days, database driven Web sites –especially big sites — are often found in content management systems (CMS). The site contributor, i.e., anyone with the appropriate permissions and with copying and pasting talent, can add to the site, effectively ending the need for HTML jockeys. I understand the importance of automation in a huge Web site, it’s just a little sad to me that those days of creativity and excitement of making a new Web page are disappearing. This, I suppose, is progress.

I used to be in the photography business and I remember the excitement of seeing my first image appear on paper under the dim amber lights of a darkroom. I was equally amazed by how I could make text change position and appearance with just a little HTML adjustment of my first few Web pages. I’m afraid I find nothing “amazing” or “exciting” about content management systems. Maybe I’m just old, jaded, and cynical beyond belief but does progress have to mean losing the opportunity for creativity, excitement and wonder?