I’ve had this designed stored away for well over six months. I’ve finally managed to get it released to the web.

I’m currently doing a live redesign on Dontcom. What this means is that the site will constantly be changing. Things are totally not polished right now so please bear with me as I tweak things up. Also, this means I’d love to have your feedback on the layout/functionality. I’ve tested in Safari and Firefox - so if there are any IE visitors (Dave) could you let me know how it looks.

If you’re reading this from a feed reader please take a moment to jump out of RSS land and have a look at the new design.

I came across this little blog post:

In art and design, finding simplicity is rarely a simple process. The concept of removing the unnecessary sounds easy enough, but in order to really succeed, the artist/designer is often required to sift through piles of very complex concepts in order to find, for example, one word that holds the meaning of an entire paragraph, or one shape that embodies several emotions. However, if true simplicity is found, its resulting companion almost always is, strangely enough, true complexity. It is within the boundaries of simplicity that complexity is best revealed, and it is this revelation that helps to shape some of today’s (and yesterday’s) best art, design, advertising, writing, and almost any other creative endeavor imaginable.

The post is about Matt Morgans art. I felt it needed more than just another lost post in my del.icio.us link log.

Day one started out with Kelly Goto’s keynote on lifestyle design. She covered some interesting topics, the main theme being the way in which we’re trying to make technology more ‘human’. She showed us a few examples of the turning effect - probably the most popular one being the Subservient Chicken.
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I released the mockup for the redesign some weeks ago. During then and now several things have happened that have prevented me from releasing this sooner.

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Disclaimer

What follows is a mind dump. I’m fully into my job. In fact, it’s more than just a job. The web is a way of life for me. I love, love, love it! Tight markup makes me feel good down there and CSS makes me shout ‘w00t!’ several times a day. So before you read this just know that most of what follows is passion driven. If some facts are incorrect please let me know and I’ll endeavor to correct them.

This is going to be a multi-part post as there is simply too much to chuck out in one go so keep an eye on your RSS reader for updates.

Introduction

The next few posts will be dedicated to what web standards mean to me. I’ll be covering five main topics:

• validating code
• accessible and semantic code
• user centered design
• web applications and apis
• the new paradigm (aka conclusion)

The phrase Web Standards is a bit of a broad one…well at least it’s becoming that way.

About two or three years ago Web Standards were simply a set of guidelines (or standards) that browser vendors would use to help build a more standardized browser. They were also a set of guidelines that web site authors would use to to build more standardised code that would ultimately work in these standardised browsers. It’s wasn’t always this way…

The good ole days?

Back in the early days - the days of Netscape 3, 4 and Internet Explorer 3, 4 - browser vendors would make up their own tags willy nilly. Some of these tags you know only too well: <center>, <blink>, etc…Some others have moved into non-proprietary standards, like <div> and <span>. That in itself wasn’t a problem…the problem was what each of these browsers did with the rendering of these tags…Some browsers wouldn’t show blinking text (and good on ‘em for that!), some browsers wouldn’t know what a div tag was…there had to be some sort of governing body to get some standards in place.

So along came the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium).

“Wait wait!” I hear you say, “the W3C has been around for AAAAAGES!”
“Yes,” you’ll hear me say in response, “but who the hell even knew what it was back then?!”
I’ll tell you - TBL. (I’ve got confused with all this first person/third person thing so I’ll just keep it simple from now on.)

Slowly the voice of the standardites grew louder. More and more people started to realise that standards in this fast growing fledgling industry was a must! Not only for browser vendors but for us HTMLers. Collectively people got fed up with the silly browser wars. It seemed way simpler and smarter to build to a global standard, not a browser vendors standard.

The validating revolution

If you haven’t heard of this revolution then it’s about bloody time you VALIDATE YOUR CODE! Probably the most important part of Web Standards is the physical act of writing code that complies to the standards provided by the W3C.

The first step to writing standards compliant code is to choose a standard to build to. I cant tell you how many web pages I’ve seen that don’t contain a Document Type Definition (DTD). This is step one! These wonderful things tell the browser what markup language you’re writing in. There are several options here, all of which have their pros and cons. I’m not going to get into those - that’s an entirely different blog post.

One should also validate your CSS. This is a sightly different kettle of fish…A vast majority of CSS out there wont validate. The reason for this is because of the CSS hacks people use to get non-compliant browsers to behave. Most of these take advantage of browsers lack of compliance, most of the time that means using some wack combo of comments, made up properties and weird characters.

Valid code makes it so much easier to debug down the line. Most rendering mishaps occur due bad markup. Validating your markup will easily help find those unclosed tags, those incorrect nesting issues and incorrect attributes.

In the next episode…

The next post in the series I’ll be talking a little more about markup and the beauty thereof. In particular I’ll be going over semantic markup, accessibility concerns and source ordering your markup.

Please remember to leave your comments. Tell me what web standards mean to you!

So here I am back in Auckland, trying to get my shit together. The past week has been such a high but now I’m finding it quite a challenge to get all my thoughts in check…

I’ll briefly go over what I enjoyed on day two of the conference. I wont cover all the speakers, just the ones that I was enthused enough to take notes about. As you may remember day one ended at a restaurant with 13 hardcore geeks. Needless to say getting up the next day was a bit of a struggle (thanks to the kingfisher!) but there was a lot of coffee and redbull to keep up going.

• Russell Brown (one of the few NZ speakers) opened up day two with an excellent talk on content and community. Russell Brown has been in the ‘content’ industry for ages, working as a journalist, radio personality and founding Public Address. He started his speech with an audio clip of David Lange’s 1985 Oxford Union debate speech and ended with an excellent video of a Starwars/LoTR mashup. In between he spoke about how content creation is slowly moving away from the mass media and how there’s been a huge turn towards citizen journalism. All in all, a very good talk with a lot of excellent references!
• Russ Weakley who is the founder of the Web Standards Group was next up with a funny and passionate talk entitled: Let go and allow users to control their own experience. For me this was one of the best talks of the conference. Not only is Russ quick-witted and dry, but he really knows his shit. His whole speech was based around this hypothetical situation: “Image you were in control of a large website with inconsistent and unwieldy structure. What if you had total freedom to redevelop the website from the ground up? What would you do?” Russ covered a lot of really interesting and out-there ideas that challenge the way we structure website content. He gave us a whole new paradigm to web design and information architecture. Throw out hierarchy; tag everything (images, text, audio); have users search for the content they’re after and return all the tagged media that related to that search term; allow users to control what they see; allow user submitted content (wikis, comments, tags). A really great way of looking at IA…a little Utopian, but fucken rad, none-the-less.
• Dori Smith - author of several books, magazine contributor, speaker and leader of the Web Standards Organisation’s DOM Scripting task force - a geek extraordinaire gave a brief introduction to unobtrusive javascript. This was a good (albeit entry-level) talk on progressive enhancement and how it pertains to javascript. She showed us how easy it is to convert nasty looking attribute event handlers to beautiful, unobtrusive javascript. The only bad thing about this talk was the fact that there were idiot ego-centric geeks who felt it necessary to point out minor unimportant errors in markup and semantics. FFS!!! Those dicks should have their hands chopped off. Dori, if you happen to read this. I thought your talk was excellent and I look forward to any others you may give in the future!
• Donna Maurer - an amazing speaker from Australia who gave a captivating presentation on usability for rich Internet applications. There are a few basic guidelines that any application should adhere to (including RIA’s.) These are: it should be efficient, effective, satisfying, easy to learn, have good error management and good feedback. Donna went through several screencasts of popular ‘web2.0′ applications and discussed several positive and negative things about them. It was really informative to see these things pointed out. Some thing were as basic as making sure buttons look 3D - this is something computer users learnt years and years ago and keeping these common design/usability trends going really makes for a far superior user experience!
• The rest of the day went in quick a blur…Tony Chor from the IE7 team gave us a demo of IE7 and talked through some of the new features. The thing that struck me about this presentation was the passion and sense of humour Tony exuded. The final presentation was by Kathy Sierra entitled Now Go Change The World. This was an awesome show. She really had the audience in the palm of her hands. At the end of it I was more inspired and psyched about web design than I’ve been in bloody ages. It was great to end on such a high note as it made for an awesome start to an evening of drinking, dancing and schmoozing. Give the geeks some beer and they’ll dance the night away!

An amazing experience! The organisers did such an amazing job. Big big-ups to Mike Brown and the team for pulling off such an awesome event! I cant wait for next year!

technorati tag: webstock

New Zealand’s only online craft and design store, Champion, has been relaunched with a new look and a new shopping cart.

The previous site was running on Zen Cart - a very badly implemented version/spin-off of OSCommerce (which isn’t very good either). It was a constant problem for us. The template engine was a complete nightmare to work with and one tiny type-o, or PHP mishap would result in a total break-down. In my opinion there is nothing zen about it. I’d go as far as to say the zen cart is the opposite of zen.

Well anyway…back to the lovely new site. It’s written in XHTML 1.0 transitional, and CSS (with a few -moz- attributes thrown in). The site loads MUCH quicker than the last one due to the lightweight code and lack of massive layout-tables. The PHP running the whole lot is a lot more simple and friendly that the zen cart. It actually allows for customer creation, logging in, checking out, all those things you’d expect from cart software! :) (Plus it’s so easy to skin/template!) Steve at Seven Internet has done an excellent job. If you’re looking for awesome shopping cart software I recommend it highly!

Please go and visit the site. Purchase something. Show your support for local, handmade, unique designs.

(An aside. I’ve forgotten how to write so I’ve been avoiding it. Maybe one day in the not too distant future I’ll update more frequently…but I’m not making any promises!)

As you may know Manda and I have been working tirelessly on the wonderful online craft and design store, Champion. Things are going quite well - I’ve managed to get my head almost fully around Zen Cart, Manda’s product photos are getting better and better by the second, and collectively we’re learning a shitload about marketing the store online. This doesn’t just mean SEO, although that is a massive part of it. It’s strange being involved so fully with ecommerce. At work and home I usually spend my time playing with blogs, CSS and semantic markup…this marketing malarkey is a different ballgame!

To take a break from all the geekery I decided to get crafty and make something for the online craft store: Vintage Record Cover Sketchbooks. These are made from the finest quality 100% recycled record cover. The paper is high grade, slightly textured and totally white! There will be more of these vinyl cover journals on the store as soon as Manda gets the product shots optimised.

Oh - and dont foget to buy them!

Update

Champion crafts now has two feeds. There is the products RSS feed and then there’s the news Atom feed. Subscribe to them. Be informed. Keep up to date with the goings on at the best design and craft store!

Wow!

This reminds me of Wildlife On One, or one of those Serengeti doco’s. There is always an awesome camera sequence of a poor little zebra running for its life with an enormous Adobe lion right on its tail. One false move and the zebra will be devoured by the greedy carnivore.

I must admit - I didn’t quite expect Macromedia to be the zebra. It makes for an interesting future - what is Adobe going to do with its new found user-base? Hopefully they’ll make the right choices, merge the right products, and dump the rest. But who knows?

Anyway - you can read about it right from the Lions den…

Champion is an online craft store that has just gone live. Champion strives to sell unique hand made crafts to the NZ/Australia market.

Its been quite a challenge getting this puppy off the ground. I tried to write my mark-up as semantically correct and accessible as i could. Its still very much in beta so if you notice any fullon bugs or mistakes please let me know!

Go and check it out, there are some awesome products that are sure to cater for all tastes.