Wednesday, June 25, 2008

It's The Little Things…

Several years ago I noticed something interesting. It's often the simple, little things, that make the difference.

Back in the middle 1970s, Honda came to market with their first Accord. It was a nice-enough little car, really. You could get it with a standard manual transmission, you could get it with a two-speed automatic. You could get it in a four-door sedan, or a three-door hatchback. And you could get it in six or eight colors. And as I said, these were nice little cars. You got carpeting. You got cloth seats. You got a rear-window defroster.

But I'm convinced that what really sold a lot of Accords was the little coin drawer in the dash. Every Honda Accord came with a little flap, a lid over on the left side of the instrument panel labeled coins. And when you opened that lid, there was a fuzzy indentation just large enough to store a couple dollars worth of dimes and nickels and pennies for parking meters, tolls, etc. You could not get these on $10,000 Cadillacs of the day, but you could get them on Honda Accords.

They asked Honda once, how much extra the car cost by including that and he chuckled saying that it was very, very little, really. "Including features like the coin tray and rear-window defogger cost very little, when you apply them to every car you build." It was enough to sway people away from a lot of other cars of the time, and launched the Accord on a thirty-year journey atop the sales charts every year.

We can do something like this ourselves, building Web pages. The W3C includes, in their design specification for HTML, an attribute named Title, which we can use to impart brief bursts of information to our page visitors. Most commonly, we see Title used with Anchor tags, links. When a visitor hovers her mouse over the Link Text, a brief "tool tip" -style window opens, explaining where the link goes or what it does, etc.

This is different from the title tag. The title tag appears only once on a page, in the head of your page, and names the page for search engines and browser bookmarks. The title attribute can be assigned to HTML elements and cause information to appear briefly on screen, helping your users to understand your page.

Including this feature is shamefully inexpensive. It takes maybe twelve or fifteen seconds to include it in a link. It really is a very little thing. But it conveys a lot of information and no small measure of comfort, to your users. People like knowing what's going on. They like knowing where they are and where they're going. Including a brief message on every link explaining what it is and where it's taking you, or why, or how, is a good habit to get into.

Anchor Tag Dialog, Showing Title Attribute Dreamweaver provides an easy way to enter Title information, at the time you are building your link. The text you place in the Title: window is what will appear briefly whenever a user hovers over the link. It's a great way to explain what would happen if someone clicked, why they should or shouldn't or answer any other questions you might anticipate someone having at that moment. Nobody should ever be surprised by anything that happens on one of your Web pages. Nobody should ever find themselves on another Web site, without knowing it was going to happen. The same goes for opening new browser windows, launching media players and downloading files. Let 'em know. It's a little thing and it means so much. What happens when someone clicks on this link? It could be anything, and that's quite daunting to people, sometimes. Let them know what to expect! (You can, of course, hover over the linked text "this link" above, and see where it goes before clicking, and decide whether or not to click based on that information.)

Titled text is read aloud by screen reader equipment to describe the link to people who may not be able to see it. And there is evidence to suggest it also figures into search engine scores, as well. There are a lot of benefits, and there is very little cost involved. So it makes you wonder: Why don't more Web developers include Title attribute text in their pages? Why don't you?

Wednesday, June 18, 2008

You Are Not Dumb. You Just Don't Know.

Each of us has a tendency to think everyone is just like us. To one degree or another, you probably think "everyone" experiences everything from the Web to the weather the same way that you do. I sure do. My own experience is the only frame of reference I have. But it rocked me the last couple of weeks when a couple of people apologized to me for not knowing something about Dreamweaver or HTML or CSS. Why would anyone feel the need to apologize for not knowing something? Needing training is not a character flaw. Especially something that is not intuitive.

2001 MonkeyThat first ape to use a leg bone as a tool may or may not have thought himself clever or innovative. In 2001: A Space Odyssey, as in so much of life, the discovery was a happy accident. But that doesn't mean the other apes were lazy. They were just happy with the way things were. They weren't bad monkeys because they didn't figure this out, first. And to his credit, the first ape shared his discovery with the rest of his shrewdness (the collective noun for "Apes" and how cool is that?) and in the next scene they are all fatter. That's the cool thing about sharing knowledge—and if you've ever met me, you know I have shared a lot of knowledge.

But there is a huge difference between picking up a bone and striking a happy meal with it and styling your scheduling table for readability and accessibility. Not knowing how doesn't make you a bad person. It may make you a bad Web designer, but it's no reason to apologize. Really, there is nothing intuitive about the way Dreamweaver works, or much of HTML either. Not knowing something isn't a character flaw.

I know several people who seem to not want training because they are afraid it will be seen as an admission that they don't know something. But if the program just shipped how can anyone expect a person to already somehow know how it all works? I was told two weeks ago of someone running into a person in a hallway who was on a cell phone call saying "Yeah, but I'm a supervisor, so I don't need to take the training". What's that about? Why wouldn't you want to know what your underlings were up to? Maybe there is an easier way to do something? Maybe they could be saving minutes or hours every time they do some common task now, but you'll never know because you haven't taken a simple class? By the way, one week ago this individual was in the training.

Now, this all works both ways, I'm afraid. People try to canonize me because I can get their form to work. All it means is that I have read one more page in the book. It's not about who is "smarter" or "better" at all. Maybe you know everything that is in Chapter 12 and I had need of whatever was in Chapter 14, so I skipped ahead. If I come to you for an answer and you come to me for an answer, who is "smarter" or "better" then? Hey, maybe I have only read one more page than you.

I have heard a lot reasons why people don't get or want training. Sure, it costs, but good training also pays. Yes, it takes time, but again, if you learn how to save a minute every time you do something and you do it sixty-one times, you're ahead of the game if you had an hour of training. You do have to get over to the classroom, but it's (usually) a nice walk and we all try to make the experience as pleasant as we can. But really, I don't want training because then people will think I didn't know? That isn't good. There is no shame in not knowing something you need to know. The shame comes in having knowledge of that situation and allowing it to continue.

Technology changes. Personnel change. Procedures change. Software and hardware change. We can take a moment in time and discover what is within those changes that will make things better, easier, faster tomorrow.

Come on, let's learn something today.

Wednesday, June 11, 2008

A New Dreamweaver?

A new wind is blowing, kids. And things are about to get… uh, let's say interesting in the Dreamweaver world. Remember the Chinese curse: May you live in interesting times? A new Dreamweaver is coming and it's going to be interesting.

I tell the story in my Introduction to Dreamweaver workshops, about how the Dreamweaver developers didn't take criticism personally, they saw them as current and potential customers explaining what they needed, to part with more of their money. And so Dreamweaver became Dreamweaver II, then Dreamweaver 3, Dreamweaver 4 and Dreamweaver 5 and it all happened on both PCs and Macintoshes. Each step along the evolutionary way the program got bigger and more feature-laden. Bugs were fixed. Processes became easier. The program itself got easier to use and more capable at every step.

And then I like to say Macromedia hired a Man Of Vision, because the next version of Dreamweaver wasn't Dreamweaver 6, but rather Dreamweaver MX 2000. And it wasn't just a new shine and a few new menu items, but a radical departure over what had gone before. Dreamweavers 1-5 were each more similar than different. A jump from version 2 to version 5 might be jarring, but you could still make your way around the program. But the new MX 2000 release was radically different. The interface was bigger and the code behind it more important, too. We had serious work to do and Dreamweaver MX 2000 was now a serious tool to help us do it. We could better deal with JavaScripts and Cascading Stylesheets and more easily build pages using Templates, PHP and more. Even issues like accessibility were beginning to get coverage. Dreamweaver MX 2000 became the basis for Dreamweaver MX 2004, evolving the new look into a powerhouse of a CSS support, Templates, Libraries and Snippets support, scripting support and more.

And then I like to think the man of vision was fired, because the next version was called simply Dreamweaver 8. Css and scripting support were again improved and the whole user experience seemed to have been made a little easier. But the program continued to look much as it had since Dreamweaver MX 2000. During this time, Macromedia was acquired by Adobe, who had their own ideas about names. Adobe doesn't like to just sell software in boxes. They want to sell Creative Suites. So, Dreamweaver 8 gave way not to Dreamweaver 9, but to Dreamweaver CS3. And there is now an open beta test for the new program, to be called Dreamweaver CS4.

I have spent only a few hours working in Dreamweaver CS4 but I can tell you, it's going to be a little harder to get your brain around everything that's going on, but if you can put in the effort, you will be rewarded. The new program is terrific, but it is different enough to cause you some anxiety.

Cs4 brings a much busier interface, with the dreaded two-rows of main menu items that are becoming more and more common now, even as average display size continues grow. But there are many good things, too. Probably the most welcomed feature to my cubicle is that you can now work in Code View in two different places within your page. Anyone who has ever had a similar page header and footer will appreciate this, as will anyone who has ever tried to format specific recurring text in specific ways. Until now, you could see only a couple dozen lines of markup. Now you can work Code View and elect to Split the display, and scroll the upper page to line 165, while you work on lines 328, much deeper into your page. It makes things much easier, not having to constantly scroll ahead and back.

It's dangerous to complain too much during beta tests about features that don't work, or much of anything really, since it's all so fluid. Beta testing is all about finding bugs, but it is also a time to receive late-arriving code that finishes various new features or does what the current code does in a more elegant way. Software engineers are all about the elegant. So it's entirely possible that things you don't like about a beta have already been fixed, or at least reported, and will be fixed before the final program ships.

So I am not going to complain about the colorless look of DWCS4, or the way that "Design View on Top" doesn't stick any more. They're probably still workshopping various new colors and Design View on Top has worked correctly for nine or ten years, so it's unlikely that won't be fixed.

If you are using Dreamweaver CS3, you have no need to change right away to CS4. There are some nice things in the new program, but it's not like there are suddenly new ways of coding JavaScript or marking up pages. If your budget is tight, keep your current program.

But if you are still using Dreamweaver MX 2000, or Dreamweaver MX 2004, or maybe even Dreamweaver 8, you should probably start saving and planning for Dreamweaver CS4. It's a bit of a learning curve, and it's frustrating whenever this happens, but it always seems to be worthwhile, in the end. Just remember: The people who brought us Dreamweaver CS3 and new CS4 beta, still have jobs. There will probably one day be a Dreamweaver CS5, no matter what they call it.

Wednesday, June 4, 2008

You Cannot Buy Your Way In

The very best Web editor you can buy won't make you a great designer. Isn't that an awful shame? I mean, what's the point in having the best Web page editing environment, if it doesn't immediately elevate you to the top wrung of the Web design ladder, right? I often think that's one of the things people mean without saying, when they tell me that they have tried Dreamweaver and don't like it. They spent the coin, took the box home and… ran straight up against the limitations of their own talent.

That's not to demean anyone. Not at all. I tell people in my HTML workshops that you can look in the newspapers every morning and see Mrs. Gonzales had a baby girl, Mrs. McMillan had a baby boy. I've been reading the birth announcements for years and I have never seen "Mrs. Fullerton gave birth this morning to a 10 pound, four-ounce baby Web designer."

Web designers are made, not born.

I have met quite a few good ones. I've met quite a few bad ones. The differences are surprisingly minor, to me. Mostly it seems to come down to putting in the hours. You can learn many Good Things from reading a Web design book. Read two and you'll get some overlap of a few key points, but still pick up a few good details as well. Read four or five, though, and you start to bump up against the point of diminishing returns and even a few conflicting points of view. But you can't really learn Web design by reading books. You have to put in the hours, building the pages.

Until you have seen how dramatically different a design can appear in two different browsers, reading about that on a page or two doesn't really sink in. Until you have put dark gray type against a dark blue background and tried to read it on a laptop, you don't really appreciate how important contrasting foreground and background colors can be in helping to make a Web page more readable, more usable.

Design is a talent, like playing guitar or singing or writing. After every great concert, I have this feeling of "I wish I could do that!". I used to play guitar for hours every day. Now, I very often don't put in a single hour in an entire week—and I own three guitars. I'd watch Dan Fogelberg or I'd see James Taylor up there on stage, having fun, getting all of that applause, and they would make it look easy. On some level I appreciate that, but whenever you see anyone really good at something, it seems like it comes easier to them than to the rest of it. It may, but an awful lot of that is just putting in the time, I'm sure.

To be good at design, you have to design. This is an issue with me because of where I am. I don't sit high enough up the food chain to be able to dictate design elements to the entire site. At my level, it's mostly filling in the blanks. And because of how we do things, with minor ongoing changes and drastic changes only every three years or so, there must be a whole lot of design muscles that don't get flexed very often. A new Template comes down and it's my job to work within it. In another several months, there will be a new design, and I may or may not have some input into it, but then it'll be my job—and everyone else's—to work within it. So in this kind of an environment there really isn't a lot of need for designers. We have the design we are going to use for a while. What we really need, now, is content, and someone to explain to everyone how the new design works and how they can get the most out of it.

I don't think most people buy Microsoft Word because they think it will make them as good a writer as Stephen King. But I think at least some of the rap Dreamweaver has taken over the years is coming from people who thought that they could buy design talent in a box, rather than spending the time developing it within themselves.