Thursday, February 23, 2006
Web Site Dynamics Advice
A young entrepreneur asked me for some advice on web site design, tools and technology, and hosting, a couple of days ago. It started with "are there open source tools for writing a Flash site?" I don't know of any, but I've not looked for any: I don't feel the need to write a Flash site. As it happens, I encountered a couple of Flash sites this morning, with very different user experiences; if one knows what they are doing, Flash can be very useful, but if one doesn't it can be obnoxious.
First, the good site. A company has developed a Flash toolkit for trade fair visit planning (at tfmap.net). I was presented a floorplan of a large trade fair, with an interactive panel for finding the stands of interest to me (by name or by category), information (in pop-up) about each stand, and the option to add the stand to my visit. When I have finished my list, it produced a pdf file (to save, print or both) with my stands highlighted, the stand name listed, and information on hours, registration, and access.
Now, the less liked site. A link to information about a concert venue opened a new window in which, below the picture, it wrote that I needed Flash to visit this site, and provided a link to download Flash. Since I had just finished preparing my trade fair visit with Flash, this seemed wrong to me. I tried to proceed: I clicked on the little arrow under the picture, since the cursor turned into a hand when over it indicating a link or button of some sort. The good news--it reacted. The bad news--yuck, it tried to open a pop-up window and Firefox blocked it. I told Firefox to go ahead and show me the content intended for the pop-up. By default, the music began; I did eventually notice I could turn it off, or choose among jazz, funk, and rock. Overall, the Flash is well done, the visit navigation is clear and friendly. I just dislike pop-ups, music on by default (no warning, even!), and being told to install software I already have.
Another concert venue had a much cleaner site which I liked, although I don't understand the Swiss text (no French or English version seems to be available): Kreuz Nidau. What's good:
Another site I like is knowgravity, another Swiss design.
One more Swiss site design I liked is Esther Brunner's, developed with Dokuwiki, a php flatfile (i.e. no need for MySQL, etc.) wiki. She develops plug-ins for Dokuwiki, too, and has a very good mastery of it. Her left-side-menubar is not part of the standard Dokuwiki distribution, but I wish it were (at least as an option). Overall, this site is a very good example of what one can do with *just* php.
Speaking of *just* php and flatfile content storage, consider too GuppY. At first, it does look pretty *busy*. The banner ad at the top, the dynamic smiley...They claim that you don't need to know html, php, or sql. When I tried it a year or two ago, that was not quite true: I had to rewrite a fair amount of php because I got a lot of error messages and warnings (no, I don't want to just turn them off, I want to run correct code). It does, compared to most wikis, have more versatile content presentation; you can use the "forum" as a blog, for instance. You can remove (easily, as I recall) any boxes you don't want (left and right columns). Nevertheless, I would not recommend it over Dokuwiki, and certainly not before checking that its code has improved.
Tags: webdesign
First, the good site. A company has developed a Flash toolkit for trade fair visit planning (at tfmap.net). I was presented a floorplan of a large trade fair, with an interactive panel for finding the stands of interest to me (by name or by category), information (in pop-up) about each stand, and the option to add the stand to my visit. When I have finished my list, it produced a pdf file (to save, print or both) with my stands highlighted, the stand name listed, and information on hours, registration, and access.
Now, the less liked site. A link to information about a concert venue opened a new window in which, below the picture, it wrote that I needed Flash to visit this site, and provided a link to download Flash. Since I had just finished preparing my trade fair visit with Flash, this seemed wrong to me. I tried to proceed: I clicked on the little arrow under the picture, since the cursor turned into a hand when over it indicating a link or button of some sort. The good news--it reacted. The bad news--yuck, it tried to open a pop-up window and Firefox blocked it. I told Firefox to go ahead and show me the content intended for the pop-up. By default, the music began; I did eventually notice I could turn it off, or choose among jazz, funk, and rock. Overall, the Flash is well done, the visit navigation is clear and friendly. I just dislike pop-ups, music on by default (no warning, even!), and being told to install software I already have.
Another concert venue had a much cleaner site which I liked, although I don't understand the Swiss text (no French or English version seems to be available): Kreuz Nidau. What's good:
- The menu: stays the same on each page. Selected option is highlighted. The top-left-corner "framing" color bar changes color when the selected menu item changes.
- The sub-menus: lighter shade of same color scheme as menu. Top is aligned with selected item in top-level menu. Does not come and go with mouse moves over the top level menu.
- The content layout: not too dense. The b+w photos in the middle of the page (always the same size, same place) are nice. If the text is too long, it goes below the photos.
Another site I like is knowgravity, another Swiss design.
- Simple, airy (lots of white); not much blinking or images changing.
- Menu bar fixed down the left side of the screen (my personal preference is left side, but anywhere is fine as long as it doesn't require reorientation on each page). It is done with css (divs), not frames.
- "home", "sitemap", "contact" and choice of language appear top-left. (Are flags for language choice better? Probably not, but one gets used to looking for them).
- The menu doesn't quite fit in my browser window (search box is below the bottom bar).
- The "main" or "content" pane does not get focus when the menu selection changes (is this still a Firefox bug?), so it requires some effort (mouse click) to scroll it.
One more Swiss site design I liked is Esther Brunner's, developed with Dokuwiki, a php flatfile (i.e. no need for MySQL, etc.) wiki. She develops plug-ins for Dokuwiki, too, and has a very good mastery of it. Her left-side-menubar is not part of the standard Dokuwiki distribution, but I wish it were (at least as an option). Overall, this site is a very good example of what one can do with *just* php.
Speaking of *just* php and flatfile content storage, consider too GuppY. At first, it does look pretty *busy*. The banner ad at the top, the dynamic smiley...They claim that you don't need to know html, php, or sql. When I tried it a year or two ago, that was not quite true: I had to rewrite a fair amount of php because I got a lot of error messages and warnings (no, I don't want to just turn them off, I want to run correct code). It does, compared to most wikis, have more versatile content presentation; you can use the "forum" as a blog, for instance. You can remove (easily, as I recall) any boxes you don't want (left and right columns). Nevertheless, I would not recommend it over Dokuwiki, and certainly not before checking that its code has improved.
Tags: webdesign
# posted by Maurice Lanselle @ 11:54 AM 
