Technology influences life

George Siemens just posted an article about “technology as Philosophy“. While the concept and article are sobering, it was the reference to a Wired article that really captured my thoughts about how serious our work as web designers really is. I highly recommend the article In Iraq With Web 2.0 Luminaries by Steven Levy. It helps us understand the big picture of what we are working to learn and express. It challenges the significance of our task to bring technologies to life, and not see them simply as tools we may or may not want to understand.

Wordle on design

I used these terms to describe our Web Design & Interactive Media program at Open House today – not quite in this order, but its all there!

It’s about solving needs

The economic crisis our nation and the world is struggling with has caused projects to be delayed, and in some cases people not hired, or let go because the employer has loss a major client. Richard Florida describes the “Uneven effects in the crisis” as it relates to jobs. He states that the intangible sector and creative sector jobs – arts, design, and entertainment, among others, are starting to register losses.

In this type of environment designers have to be clear about the difference between “treating a website like a commodity” (Andy Budd) and putting more thought and research into projects and making sure you are meeting the needs of users.

When we describe the need to create projects in courses that are “real world”, we are referring to issues that employers can identify with as the types of issues they work on daily. It is near impossible to identify such issues, without research and planning. It is simply not good enough to make a website that is better than one for a similar product. It is not about creating a site that “beats out” the competitors sites. Users are seeking to meet their needs, and unless you take the time and effort to see problems from the users perspective, you will find difficulty in satisfying today’s users. Students of Web Design and Interactive media, as well as other design disciplines, need deeper skills at learning to understand the user before going with the first good idea that comes along. You really can’t afford to wait until you graduate to develop these skills. You will need them as you hit the ground running.

References to further this post:
Uneven Effects of the Crisis, by Richard Florida
Don’t treat your website like a commodity, by Andy Budd
How the crash will reshape America, in The Atlantic, by Richard Florida

DFW WordPress Group

The WordPress User Group in our area meets this coming Saturday at 4:00 at Spaghetti Warehouse on Central Expressway in Plano, just north of 15th Street on the West access road. Unfortunately there is a limit on attendance and only 1 spot remains, however, try and register and RSVP in case there is more space. The Meetup announcements are located at: http://www.meetup.com/dfwwordpress/calendar/959387. This is a good way to meet bloggers, and learn from the professionals, as well as learn more about WordPress!

Develop in the cloud!

Mozilla labs has recently announced “Bespin” a new “text editor” available online that works through a browser. The promise of this type of cloud-based product (available online) is one I would love to see become a standard. As an opensource editor this just might happen. I registered to try out the current demo framework – not a beta, and found the interface and speed very interesting and simplified from existing html editors. The fact that it will be a collaborative tool also makes it interesting. And I wouldn’t have to ask anyone if we used it for classes! As I have shared many times, I think cloud computing is where we are headed, and this is an exciting example of a new breed of tool with fresh open-source ideas to grow it. You and I can participate by trying the demo and offering suggestions to the team at Mozilla Labs.

You can register and view an introductory video at bespin.mozilla.com to get a feel for the product.

I would like to collect some comments from students/instructors on your reaction to this product.

WordPress Theme Frameworks

For web designers who may want to use WordPress as a robust content management system, might want to review some of the newer WordPress theme frameworks that are available.

Theme frameworks are not particularily new as the Sandbox theme has been a standard for taking the basics of a WordPress page and then adding theme information (CSS) to the basic structure.

But some recent frameworks are more sophisticated and aimed at making the CMS features of WordPress easier to work with when there is a lot of development to do or a designer is responsible for creating a lot of WordPress sites for customers.

As in other programming and markup environments (JavaScript, CSS, AJax, etc.) a framework is a completely coded theme that can serve as the base for many projects. Often the framework can be added to (as with several WP theme frameworks) with child themes – a way of changing the look and function of the base framework, yet using its many resources. (Justin Tadlock)

Tadlock’s article “Why I created a WordPress theme framework“, provides a good understanding of WordPress theme frameworks. Of the theme frameworks I have reviewed [Thematic, Vanilla, Hybrid, and Carrington] I think there are some creative uses of these products. I particularly like the Carrington framework, even though I have not completed a child theme with it. But if you need to save time, but also have time to learn the framework, these could be valuable assets in creating solid WP based websites.

Links to each of the frameworks mentioned and others are located on the WordPress Theme Frameworks link stated above. By the way, I forgot to mention that these frameworks are free – as in open source. Thematic does offer commercial versions but it freely offers the base framework.

Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0

On December 11, 2008, the W3C announced the WCAG 2.0 is now a W3C Recommendation. This is an important new component of everything we do as web designers. It is important that you read the documentation, collaborate with others in the program and outside in the developer community, and begin to understand the changes and the significance of the new standards for accessibility. A good starting point has been provided by Roger Johansson at 456 Berea St. The actual specification can be found at WCAG.

More on this later and expect to be working on this in all web scripting classes.

12 Notebook Tools for research

One of the most valuable tools for your learning environment is a digital notebook tool that is capable of capturing practically any digital file, image, video, or other type of presentation. Mashable.com has an excellent review of 12 notebook tools that should help you in choosing one of these tools for your personal needs. If you want to find new ways to manage information you choose to capture, this type of tool may be of value to your arsenal.

Web Design Magazines

Looking for places to hang? Smashing Magazine offers “42 Design/Tech magazines to read”. I often have difficulty getting started on a project or writing assignment and I go to my aggregator and read until I find inspiration. I always start with some that I know consistently spark an interest, but I do a lot of exploring for new ideas and just to initiate the get-started juices flowing.

Sometimes you may need to find a community or a person who offers regular news, tips, design wisdom, etc. to get you started on new ideas or just to keep up with what professionals are doing. The Smashing article lists a lot of sites I haven’t checked out yet – so if any of you read one I haven’t seen, let the rest of us know it was of value to you and why – when you get a chance of course!

Some of my regular spots to hang include:
Digital Web Magazine, a solid edited work of many of the top designer/developers, with topics on everything anyone has felt important to write about.
A List Apart, sponsored by Jeffrey Zeldman, is also an important source of invited guest authors, some of the best in the business here also.
Boxes and Arrows is a serious journal approach to peer-reviewed articles about design, info architecture, and related topics. It has been an important voice in the industry since 2001.
Vitamin is a newer community oriented approach to zines, focused on the web design/developer industry. Good articles, job boards, community forums, etc.
9 Rules is also a community oriented site that collects the “best of the web” with articles, practical tips, and news of the industry.

A group of sites that are industry references, specialty areas, and news about the industry include:
Read/Write/Web, a no-nonsense place to keep up with emerging web trends, web 2.0, and general news.
Wired, online and print versions (AID library) is one of my must reads. My personal subscription to the print version is running on about 12 years now!
TechCrunch, is about technology issues affecting our industy – that stuff we absolutely have to keep informed about to do our work.
Mashable specializes in everything social networking, and it does it with flare and depth. Their reporters give live views of conferences about this exciting aspect of the industry.
.net is another online and print magazine with some of the top guys in the industry such as Andy Clark and Andy Budd serving on its editorial board. One of several outstanding British publications, I catch this one in our library every month.
Lifehacker is the tech workers answer to organization processes such as Getting Things Done. Useful and informative information about how to keep yourself participating in the information explosion and to many due date deadlines!
Digg and Slashdot bring us user directed news about the industry – each with its own unique process, but driven by its user community as to what is published, and important to be published. At least one of these may be a mainstay, depending on which you like.

With all of these resources, find the ones that are meaningful to you, and find out who is behind the effort. Get to know the names of people communicating about the industry, as well as noted designers and developers whose work you respect and admire. Build yourself a community within your domain of interest.

WordPress 2.6 release

WordPress 2.6 was recently released and Hiveminds has a video with the new features.

Several new features include the abiliity to Post revisions – and go back to an earlier version to see if you might like it better. This works for collaborative blog entries as well as your personal entries. Just scroll down past options for a list of revisions – including dates and time written.

Press This is a bookmarklet you can install on your browser. When you are visiting a web site and want to copy some text, an image, or a video, press the bookmarklet to open a page and drag and drop the item(s) to a new post!

You can also now add captions to your images. When you place an image in your post a space for adding a caption will be there to capture your descriptions.

Other smaller changes and bug fixes are part of the release.