I Love It When a Plan Comes Together

I love it when a plan comes together. The Templates are about to deployed here at work, the product of a lot of people spending a lot of hours working on a lot of solutions, and then choosing one and making it the best.

Early-on, we started this knowing that whatever we ended up with, it would be the page we looked at for at least three years—maybe even longer. So, like a car designer, we had to try to peer into the future a little ways and figure out what kind of a market we would be selling into. It takes about three years to design a new car, too.

Today, the language we use to mark up our pages is XHTML. Would that be the best choice for 2012, though? We use version 1.0, Transitional. Would there be any advantage in moving to another definition, such as Strict at this point? There were two working groups when we started, one was at work on building a new XHTML, XHTML 2. The other—wonder of wonders—was hard at work building a proposed new HTML 5. If you have ever taken my HTML training, you know that for years now I have been dancing around telling people that they can learn all of HTML, because there wouldn’t be another one. HTML 4.01 was supposed to be the last.

So, how would you have bet? We hashed it out for a while and decided to stick with XHTML 1.0, Transitional. It’s been good to us, so far. People seem comfortable using it. It has good fidelity between platforms and browsers. And just a week after we made that decision, the XHTML 2 committee came apart at the seams. So it may be a long, long time before we get any new markup languages. When that day comes, we will probably examine things again, surveying the then-current landscape and trying to puzzle-out the future.

We are learning as we go, in this process. Things won’t always be as they are now, the second rule of investing, applies here. Just as we cannot know about inflation, unemployment, advances in technologies or disruptions in supply lines years ahead we don’t really know who will be building the Template of 2020, or how. I’m reminded of that every time we talk about the heading area of the page, today. The editable area is still named “titlegraphic” from the days years ago when it actually was an image file. If we only knew, then, what we know today, we could have done a much better job all along.

Still, we expect transmission speeds inside the buildings to stay about the same or improve slightly. We expect the normative screen size to stay about the same or increase, slightly. We expect that handheld devices are not going to suddenly become less popular in the years ahead and so we will soon begin looking at ways to better include them in our design considerations.

And we expect to again lead the way in validated pages and accessible design. That’s something I am really proud of. We lead the league in Good Pages, something I point out at every training session.

I’m talking here like we are done with everything for this next cycle. We are not. The work continues, fleshing out this or that deficiency and smoothing over this or that awkward feature. That kind of thing continues right up until deployment of the next Template. But for now, even though we aren’t done we have come to most visible checkpoint in the process, the one with the most rapid and convincing change. And now, looking back, it’s really amazing at what all we did. I love it when a plan comes together.

Lazy Days of Summer

I have always been a weird kind of lazy. I love that feeling of accomplishment that comes from finishing a job that’s been hanging over you for a while. Love It! And I will work like a dog to get that feeling, again. But then, damnit, I want a little time to actually relax and enjoy that moment for a while.

I have found, again and again, that there is nothing like a Big Project to get me to finish a bunch of little projects. Efficiency experts discuss this kind of thing in terms like avoidance techniques. I never feel like I’m actually avoiding anything, or even really putting anything off. I mean, just spend a few minutes thinking about it and I am sure that you can draw a straight line connecting emptying out the recycling trash in my cubicle and putting together a new presentation on Web templates, right?

I need to accomplish “X” today. I would like to accomplish “Y” and it would be great if I could get around to working on “Z”, too.

So I sit down and start thinking about “X”. How long will it take me? How many people will be seeing it and who are they? Do they understand all of the various cogs and gears that go into “X” or will I have to explain that to them, too? Hmm… I wonder how other people have explained “X” before this? Wasn’t there a version of “X” a few years ago that had no calories? Do they even deal with “X” any more in the leading… “Ooooh! I need to empty out the recycling!” Okay, I can work on “X” all day, but that recycling isn’t going to empty itself. And while I’m up and on my way down the hall, I should probably stop and see if there is any inter-office mail in my inbox.

So I dump out the newsletters from the credit union and all of the stuff about upcoming concerts and speeches and source listings from pages I have already forgotten, and on my way back, I stop and check the box for any more paper that will probably go straight into the newly-empty recycling. But the whole time I am doing this stuff, I am thinking about “X”.

I cannot just sit idle. And not just because it looks bad—that is always the moment the boss walks by. I have to be doing something, and I usually am. Quite often while I am doing one thing, I am thinking about another. This can be a huge distraction and I don’t recommend it for everyone, but I have learned to build lists and to prioritize the entries there and always have something in the bag for the next big project that is a little more thinky than the kind of thing you can just sit down and crank out.

Right now, in the back of my mind, I am mulling over options for how to discuss something in the new Template training which is just going together now. I could sit down and crank out a page showing how it’s done, and then end up deleting everything and trying again after lunch. Or I could stop and bang out this week’s blog update and keep tossing the Templates training over and over in my mind until I get it all worked out, and then commit it all to hot phosphor.

As these things go, I have in fact just figured out how best to do the Next Big Thing in the Templates training, so I must close this out, for now.

And once again, I have filled what might otherwise have been time spent staring off into space with accomplishing something else that needed to get done. If anyone had walked by and seen me, it would have looked exactly like I was updating my blog. But this evening, when my wife asks me what I did this morning, I’ll tell her I was working on my Templates training.

But I’ll tell you one thing: When I get home at 5pm, it all stops and I get to relax, until it all starts up again in the morning.

New Templates; New Troubles.

I try to keep most of these posts rather generic, discussing my job and various aspects of it only as they apply to the discussion at hand. But this week, I probably should spend a few calories discussing the new Templates we are rolling out at work, and how that is going to affect a lot of people.

I really had high hopes, after checking out the Web site and reading the book that David Shea and Molly Holzschlag put together some years ago. One day, this is how all design changes would happen, right? I mean, as a proof-of-concept vehicle, the Web site proved it was not only possible, but made it look easy!

Well, of course, there’s easy and there’s easy. The task we are about to embark upon is easier than it might have been back in the Olden Days of font tags and tables. But it falls short of the dream of the one-button update by a ways.

There are things we should all be doing, now, to make our lives easier in the immediate future. First, validate page markup and CSS and get that out of the way. This is difficult enough when the markup is correct. Asking for a clean update when you start with poor markup is just asking for trouble.

I really like the idea of building a shadow site, a kind of a test site, and working on getting your pages updated in there. You can name this directory /beta2009/ or /beta/ or /incubator/ or whatever you’d like, then copy all of your page files into this new directory.

You need to point at this new directory with Dreamweaver. I copied my original site in the Manage Site box, then opened it up and changed the name and the URL strings for the Local, Remote and Testing servers. Go slowly here, and take your time and don’t do anything that you don’t fully understand, first. The goal is to end up with a site you can click on to open http://www.unl.edu/yoursite/ and one to open up http://www.unl.edu/yoursite/beta2009/. This new location features what we used to call “Security Through Obscurity”. Nobody should be visiting the pages here, because nobody will know they are there. They all reside within the unlinked directory /beta2009/ within your “real” site.

Having made the changes, consider making an archive of your site as it exists today. Name it site.zip and place this on your desktop, outside of the Dreamweaver environment. If you ever need to return to a current-template page, it will be in here.

Start slowly and deliberately and work your way through your new /beta2009/ site, document-by-document, folder-by-folder. From your Modify menu, you want to select Templates down at the bottom. Apply Template to Page... is the selection you want to make. We use the fixed-width Template, so select that one. There are elements we do not use this time, such as the college navigation area. You will want to map those to “Nowhere” and click “Use for all” and then “OK”. Your page should update into the new look. Save it and check it, remembering its new address in the /beta2009/ folder.

Remember you want to keep your own navigation and related links and footer information, so be careful when you un-pack your new Templates folder and sharedcode folder into your /beta2009/ site. Again, point and click and type slowly and make sure you understand what is expected to come up, at every point. Save often. Put often. Check your pages in a Web browser often. Check your old pages often, too, to make sure you aren’t working on the live pages.

Make whatever edits you need and consider how the extra room is going to be used in the new Template design. Maybe you have lists that could go in their own columns. Maybe you have styled certain page elements based on percentages and these are now not quite optimal, because the size of the container is bigger, now. Work your way through all of the pages in a folder before going on to the next one, starting at the documents at your root (top) level. When you are done, give yourself a day or two if you can and then come back and see how the pages look in the new design.

On the day of the rollout, drag your pages out of the /beta2009/ folder to make them live, replacing the information that is already there (and which you have safely copied into your .zip file). Then just wait for the accolades to roll in.

I suspect we will all meet somewhere the evening of the 17th and toss back a few, raising toasts to the valiant crew of the Web Developer Network. I suspect that some of us will want a few drinks by then. And some of us will probably need them.

Good luck!

Sure, You CAN, but Should You?

Promise me this much: When I die, please don’t hold my memorial in the Staples Center?

Let’s talk a little about perspective and what is appropriate, and all the while, let’s dance around the issue of good taste.

You can do all kinds of things with a Web page. You can use seventeen fonts, or more, on a single page. You can use thirty colors for type and background and so on. You can have nine vertical columns, or you can have only one.

You can make all of the mistakes in Web Pages That Suck, either the book or the Web site (or both). Or you can learn from the mistakes of others.

You can argue that you prefer a single column, 24” across, of 9pt text. But deep inside, in your heart of hearts, you have to know that most people would rather have that horizontal space broken up into more manageable column sizes. That’s why we have columns in our newspapers and even in our magazines—and in our better Web pages, too.

Maybe you love Blue. You enjoy light blue text against a dark blue background, with varying shades of blue in the page headers and image borders and so on. Monochromatic sites have their place, but it may not be the way to go if you are trying to reach, and keep, a wide audience. In their way, staying entirely within a single color family can be as awful as dealing with dozens of colors in a busy, frantic page.

I can do things when I build a Web site for a band that I would never do if I was working on a page for, say, an attorney. Grunge fonts, dark shadowy images, Flash treatment of various links providing scary rollover effects? Is that what you want when you are looking for some entertainment on a Saturday night? Or is that what you look for when your dog gets loose and bites the neighbor kid and you have to go to court? Likewise, do you want solid, conservative, gravitas-laden images, graphics and design when you are deciding what band to go and see? Is there a band anywhere that tours in Grey Flannel? The early Beatles were the last band I remember performing in suits, and even those were collarless.

Even once you have settled on major themes there are still a great many other design properties that need to be settled dealing with the purpose of a page. Are you trying to provide reference material online? Are you trying to build an online brochure? You need to use a whole different toolbox if you are just presenting information than you would use if you were trying to convince someone of something, or trying to showcase what features and benefits accrue to satisfied customers of your work.

Special menu effects are interesting and fun when they don’t get in the way, but they aren’t going to help boost your traffic if your page explains how to do something. If I land on your page from a Google search because I want to lean how to set my computer to automatically wake up and go to sleep at different times every day, I’m not going to probably ever come back just to marvel at the way your navigation grows, shrinks and evolves. Money, time and other resources spent building glamorous navigation is going to be lost on that kind of a page, where again, if the page was more of a brochure, that kind of thing might be much more appropriate.

If you are building pages for a retirement community, are eight- and nine-point text sizes the best you can choose? Sure, a user should be able to adjust their browser or their computer to compensate for whatever shortcomings a designer may have left them, but older people are most likely to have problem seeing smaller text, and least likely to know how to make changes.

You have a lot of power, when you sit down to build a Web page. With great power comes great responsibility. Be sure you use it wisely.

What Can You Do With 1¢ and 5ive Minutes?

From time to time, someone comes to me in a panic because their Web site has, after careful application of time and talent, suddenly started showing up in Korean. Or the neat columns of deeply meaningful text now suddenly scroll behind the images, or appear three times their normal size.

I usually sit with them and point and click and explain, “See this? This is why we don’t do this…” and “See that? I wouldn’t recommend doing it like that” and so on. After an interval, or since I’m reading a lot of turn-of-the-last-century books lately, after a fullness of time, we get it worked out. Pages and jobs and careers are saved. Bands play, parades are organized and someone promises to name all of their children “Mark” in my honor. This gives me a nice, fuzzy, warm feeling. Really, it does. But come on—it’s not rocket science and it really isn’t all that difficult once you know what you are doing.

But that’s just it. They don’t know what they are doing. Or they are terribly unsure. They hand out the platitudes like candy—one gal used to call me an “HTML God” in an overly-exaggerated and not-cute insincere way. Rather than say something like that to me, I would have preferred she dedicate thirty minutes a week to learning. That’s really all it takes. It doesn’t even have to be thirty minutes all in one day.

At the height of the dot-bomb, there were quite a few computer book series with deceptive names like Learn ABC in 24 Hours. The hook was that most people think they will learn it all in a day, but the book was basically divided up into twenty-four hour-long lessons, each of which nearly always took me longer than an hour to complete. But the germ of the idea is perfect: Carve up the difficult task at hand into dozens of smaller portions that you can handle.

Maybe for you that means an afternoon every week; maybe it’s only an hour. Maybe, it’s only ten minutes, today. The point is that it all adds up. If there are, in fact, 4287 things to learn, and you knock off ten minutes and pick up two things, then you only have 4285 things left to learn.




Sure, it requires an investment. You have to spend, at least, some time. You probably have to spend some money, but the amount is surprisingly little. Most of my training sessions run $40 as this is written, and at least one is free! You can find very good reference and learning material at giveaway prices. For a penny, you could afford to place copies of the HTML book I recommend most often in your car, in your cubicle, in your lunchbox, in your living room and at your bedside and even get a copy for your, uh, Reading Room. You know, the one with the really great acoustics. You can’t even get gum from machines any more for a penny, but you can learn HTML to the level of the best experts out there. Such a deal!

I know a lot, sure. I have been doing this since 1993. Start today and you can learn it all, too. Remember, I didn’t learn it all in an afternoon, or over a weekend. And I didn’t learn it all from books, either. Most of it comes from building some truly awful pages, laughing, crying and starting over. Make a mistake. Try to fix it. Read-up on it and ask around, see if you can solve the problem on your own and then move on.

I am, I keep reminding people, a sweetie. But I am not a deity and I was nor born with the knowledge I have today. Look in the newspaper every day, I like to point out, and you’ll see birth announcements for little boys and little girls. I have been reading these for years and have never seen a eight-pound, four-ounce Web Designer born. Web Designers are made. Make yourself into one. Start today.