RSS feeds and Google Chrome
I am not sure if anyone else uses, or has used, Google’s new Chrome browser. I downloaded it recently to try it out and have liked it for the most part. The problem I just encountered with it is when trying to subscribe to an RSS feed. Everytime I click on an RSS link it directs me to a page that has, I guess we’ll call it “naked”, RSS coding. So mostly a page that looks like gibberish. I ended up having to manually add all of the feeds to my reader by copying the URL which I thought was retarded. I was just seeing if anyone knew why this was happening or not. I guess I am gonna go back to using Firefox full-time.
Previous Work
Hey guys, sorry about the late posting. I was at a friends house last night who didn’t have Internet access and I was trying to play it safe and not drive in the ice.
I enjoyed reading about the various projects that Simple Bits had been involved in. They have worked with some major companies! That would definitely be a great resume for any design firm, hopefully I can achieve even half of those clients in my future as a web designer. The only thing that I wish they had added would be client feedback or testimonials. It would be great to hear what ESPN or Google had to say about working with them.
On the Happy Cogs site I really enjoyed the case history about their Kongregate design process. The speed in which they were able to conceptualize and develop the site from scratch was awesome. I also liked the section about flexibility, as users and designers came on board things about the site design had to be fluid and change along with them to accommodate.
Hicks Design was a fun site to look over. I thought that his logo designs were really fun and smart. I thought it was pretty cool how they had worked alongside Stuff and Nonsense to design the Really Worried site. I also really liked the layout of his site, it was really simple, aesthetically pleasing, and easy to navigate.
I do wish that there had been client feedback or testimonials on all of these sites, but I still immensely enjoyed reading up on the previous work these design firms had been involved in. I think it helps us in understanding how to approach a new design project, as well as reminding us that people and potential clients will also find previous works interesting and helpful when choosing a web design firm. I think it will be an integral part of my portfolio site.
Site Planning Aids the Design Process
About a year and a half ago I got involved in putting together a website for a church as part of some community service requirements. Upon beginning the project I asked a few basic questions, the majority of them based on how they would like the website to look and so on. I did touch on a few areas about what the goals of the website were, and no one seemed to know.
Looking back now I realize that I should have pressed the issue further or taken Karen Morrill-McClure’s advice from the blog Creating a Site Plan. The only problem was, at the time I started working on this web site I had no idea what Information Architecture was and had certainly not heard of, or read, anything about her.
To say the least the implementation of the website was a disaster. We had no goals for the site, so therefore I had no direction in the site’s design. I coded some pages aimlessly changing approaches and design ideas daily until I realized that I was getting nowhere. Even though I finally settled on a design and built 8 or 9 pages based on it, it was still far from a working site. There was no content since there was no goal for the site, and a page without content is absolutely worthless. Since my “client” did not know why or what they needed a site for, and I didn’t know a tactic for extracting that information from them, the web site was never 100% complete.
Just so that I could return a finished product to them, I copied content from a few of their brochures to put up on the pages and called it quits with a final, “If you decide that you would like anything else to go up on this site after you have had a chance to look it over, please feel free to give me a call.”
After taking Information Architecture and reading this article I realize now that I should never have even begun to work on a site without a solid set of goals and a plan in mind. This is absolutely the most important part of a design project, because without it you can get turned around and lost in a project before you even know it. Having a plan before-hand gives you something on paper, something tangible, that you are working towards. As well as some guidelines to work off of when you come upon a design related decision. Even though it seems like boring work and may feel like it’s taking up too much of your time, it will certainly save time and expense in the long run.
I had not thought of the story of the church website quagmire in a long time, maybe it was just one of those life experiences you would just rather block out. After thinking about it while writing this I decided to stop by the website and see how it was doing but the URL is no longer working. I guess there probably was never much of a need for the website to start with, which is something that I would have known from the beginning if I had taken the proper steps during the research and planning phase. Oh well, you live and you learn.
