heisel.org

RSS change

Tuesday | April 29, 2003 | 9:08 am  

Not to be considered a hypocrite, I’ve changed my RSS feed to only show an excerpt and link back to the full article, ala Zeldman.

Permalink | Comments (1) | Categories: Web design

The design is the message

Friday | April 25, 2003 | 1:31 pm  

Zeldman, in the course of several days has gone from saying, rightfully, that the design is an inherent part of content and that’s why he didn’t have an RSS feed, to creating his own hand-rolled feed.

He apparently got some nasty comments, and has said that design is still a form of content and that his feed is merely the moral equivalent of an opt-in e-mail system. I take the same view of my RSS feed. It is merely another method to attract readers to my site and let them know of updates.

I applaud Mr. Zeldman for taking the, often unpopular, stance that design is a part of content. There are a lot of Web “designers” out there who either a.) never learned about content-driven design or b.) learned about it and don’t care.

I am an unabashed supporter of content-driven design: design isn’t just about looks. Design is about solving problems, helping readers (viewers, listeners, etc.) find what they want and telling stories. Put simply, we are here to communicate, the words that are written, the photos that are shot and edited, and the pages put together should all serve to send a message: preferably one unified message.

Many “designers” on the Web today are just stylists who can make things look “cool.”

I’ll take communication over cool any day…

Permalink | Comments (1) | Categories: Web design

Yeah, I want to see that ad

Monday | April 21, 2003 | 8:34 pm  

Steve Outing brings up an interesting solution to a problem that not many of us think about: wanting to see an ad that rotated out.

He suggests placing a link that lets you go back and forward through the rotating ads, or a link to an advertiser index.

While I’ve never quite understood the ad index in magazines — I mean I can flip back and forth and find the ad on my own, but I digress — I think it’s a great idea on the Web, especially with a link near an ad spot as Mr. Outing suggests.

Web advertisements often, unfortunately, have one of the weak spots of TV ads, their fleeting nature. You click a new link and the ad you saw is gone, perhaps forever.

Well done TV ads can counter their fleeting nature with the ability to be very compelling and memorable (Waassssup, and its ilk) — something I’ve yet to see Web ads do, though I think the medium is capable of it. The Absolut flash-ad campaign that’s been running on The Onion is the closest thing I’ve found.

Newspapers, on the other hand, don’t have as nearly as compelling ads as TV, but do have stickiness and limited (geographic) targeting capability. The ads in your paper don’t rotate or go away till you round file them.

Web ads can counter with the potential for great targeting, once we get some sort of single sign-on for news sites, but lack permanence and aren’t very compelling, yet.

Providing a way to cycle through the ads, or to visit and index to find the advertiser you just saw, is a step in the right direction.

Permalink | Comments (3) | Categories: Business

Forward, fast

Monday | April 14, 2003 | 6:03 pm  

The new version of Opera comes with an interesting new feature: fast forwarding.

The browser can detect link-next elements and allow users to move forward through a site from the brower’s forward button.

While many people visit news sites looking for specific information, I think using something like this new feature could make news sites more browseable.

Adrian Holovaty has talked about the code that makes this possible, and says Mozilla/Netscape can do something similar in their sidebars.

I really like the idea of having this type of browseability in the main toolbar as well — it helps out those like me with small monitors who can’t afford the screen real estate of the Mozilla sidebar.

Permalink | Comments (1) | Categories: Web design

Copy, edit thyself

Wednesday | April 2, 2003 | 12:17 pm  

I caught this at 12:09 p.m. CST.

You can automate workflow, you can generate pages on the fly, but it don’t matter a lick if your caption is missing the word “the.”

Permalink | Comments (0) | Categories: Journalism