The 2000 and Late Web Designer

[tweetmeme source=”alisonheittman” only_single=false http://bit.ly/ek49tq%5DI have been working in and around the Internet and specifically on business websites since 1999 (that’s a lot of years in Internet-time), and have been fortunate to be a team member on some absolutely amazing projects. I have worked with a lot of designers, and have found that they typically fall somewhere on a linear scale that ranges from technical expert to creative visionary. It is the rare (and coveted) professional that has equal coverage on both ends of the scale. And it is the designer that falls smack dab in the middle that I want to address today.*

You need to step up your game and get with the times.

There are a lot of perfectly adequate designers that can create a visually acceptable design in Photoshop or Dreamweaver and turn it over to a third party to implement. They have created enough sites that they know how to design something that is usually 85-100% possible to implement out of the gate by an equally skilled coder. They have been able to get away with not knowing HTML, CSS and scripting because they could outsource that piece of the project. But the aesthetic of the web is evolving as HTML5 and CSS3 blow open the doors of what is possible in the world of web design. Ignoring these developments means that the sites you are designing are already dated at the time of their launch.

Last week one of my friends was talking about one of his projects, a high-traffic website that received an attractive big agency redesign about three years ago. It’s a nice site, but he is aware that it has already grown dated, and wants to address that, and huge props to him. So, if, as a designer, you’re still churning out the same three styles of navigation as you were 3 years ago, the same tired Flash banner at the top, using the same fonts, etc., how soon until your customer reaches the same point my friend just did?

I am not saying that 100% of all sites will be best served by having a similar faddish style. The great thing about design is that no two designers will turn out the same vision based on the same design brief and requirements. They shouldn’t be restricted to only creating what they couldn’t create last year (or three years ago). But with HTML5 and CSS3, the bar has been set higher than an Olympic pole vaulter can clear. Are you a high school champion, or are you Jenn Suhr?

I am sorry if you have a block and can’t learn HTML and CSS. But that is no excuse for not reading up on your profession to keep up with what is new and bleeding edge. Simply knowing how to run Dreamweaver or Photoshop isn’t enough, you need to be immersed in the possibilities of the web of 2011. How many “Ultimate Collection of jQuery Plugins of 2011” and “Top 36 CSS3 Tools” and “12 Best of the Absolute Best HTML5 Canvas Graphing Solutions” lists need to be published before you crack one open for a little inspiration? If you design websites, you should be looking at what the competition is doing, how you can extend your medium to get the best result for your customer that will last them a reasonable period of time. Consider this: I doubt the Nissan Leaf was designed to meet and exceed the features of the original Prius, but rather they wanted it to compete with the current and next generation of green automobiles. Respect yourself and your own profession enough to do the same.

So on your next project, when you are bringing your comps to the client for approval, show them examples of which navigation you want to use, the form tool you’re recommending for their site, the font you want to embed, etc. Leverage your coding partner’s knowledge to find these tools, and other fun toys that will get your client excited about their new site. Because you can offer them more than a static drawing of their potential site, your vision can include more than the graphic elements you create, and your clients deserve it. And so does your portfolio.

* Please note: I am leaving the designers at the “creative visionary” end of the scale out of this, because they’re already stretching the bounds and setting their own styles, and that is the immense value they bring. And the “technical expert” is already deep in the guts of HTML5 and CSS3, and leading the pack in technical innovation.

One Trick Pony Extinction Crisis

[tweetmeme source=”alisonheittman” only_single=false http://bit.ly/hAeieR%5D”Oh Noes, Google is a One Trick Pony” stories have been cropping up in my Twitter stream again, mostly thanks to a January 27 GigaOM post. And yet, the day before, I caught a TechCrunch article about Google’s periodic table of APIs and developer projects. And here’s the crazy thing that might shock you – there’s more than one thing on it!!

I have a hard time understanding how anyone can write an article about a company with as many projects and lines of business as Google,  and show no sign of being aware of any of them.  It’s like it all doesn’t exist – which makes me wonder how the heck my company has an Android App for Five Guys Burgers & Fries in beta right now. Our team was an early adopter of Google Web Toolkit (projects include the massive IUCN Species Information Service Toolkit, a restaurant point of sale, content management, and more), and Gerrit has been pretty revolutionary for us, but maybe that’s all just a mirage. We partnered to launch one of the first ocean layers on Earth, and Google Maps are heavily embedded in our Protect Planet Ocean and ProtectedPlanet.net projects, but no, that must all be faked. I could continue and mention that in Q4 2010 Android was apparently the world’s leading smartphone platform, but you get my point.

Other themes in technology fanboy reporting & blogging that bother me include:

• Articles about how the iPhone/Android/whatever smartphone is better than the other one, when they clearly have barely held the device they’re disparaging.
• Declarations that small business owners only need Foursquare/Gowalla/whatever to reach their customers, because everyone in their area spends all their time on their smartphones. Please, get out of the Valley and take a realistic look at the average business in small town (even big city) America.
• The “Google Search Results” suck meme. Maybe it’s because I’ve got my MLS and actually know how to search, but I’ve never had any problems. Show me some actual examples and serious metrics, rather than taking the “everyone is saying” approach to research.
• “___ hot recent technology is dead because there’s the new ___” (You know you’ll be inserting “Ruby” and “node.js” sometime in the next few months). If we’re talking about a technology that hasn’t reached it’s full potential, it’s not dead yet. If you’re thinking this, chances are you’re the type of developer that prefers to always look for and embrace the next great thing while leaving the last thing behind. That’s not necessarily bad, but it also doesn’t make your old love dead.

United has a programming #fail

[tweetmeme source=”alisonheittman” only_single=false http://bit.ly/dw50RY]My clock is a little off, mostly because I flew home from Switzerland two days ago. But sometimes I wonder if it’s because I completely missed daylight savings time (DST) ending on Sunday. I’m sure you’re dying to know, how is this possible?

Well, I arrived in Switzerland on Monday, November 1. DST, or European Summer Time (EST), ended on October 31, so their clocks had already changed. (As an aside, did they all get up in the middle of the night and change their clocks at the same minute, because I’ve heard how the Swiss are with timekeeping?) And I landed in the US 16 hours after it ended over here. So I wasn’t physically present when the clocks got reset. That’s making me feel a little weird.

But I did run into a minor programming issue because of it. You know how you can check into your flight 24 hours in advance? Well, I had an 11:55am flight on Sunday, so around that time I get all the helpful email reminders to check into my flight. Only I can’t. Because the programmers didn’t take into account that EST ends a week earlier than DST, so 24 hours was literally at 11:55am on Saturday. They made me wait until 12:55, to make up for the hour that would be gained in the US.

So here’s to you, IT people/programmers/person-who-go-this-wrong at United Airlines. You had a really, really basic fail for not taking into account the difference between DST & EST. You’ve got about six months to work to get it right next time – think you can do it?

The .ly Fine Print Bites Back

[tweetmeme source=”alisonheittman” only_single=false http://wp.me/pYPzx-1o%5DYou might be surprised to hear that there were other things going on today in the tech world aside from Facebook announcements and Foursquare downtime. One of the real master of the obvious stories is that we’re finally discovering that “.ly” domains might not be the best to build a business on.

The news broke today (TechCrunch, Mashable, ReadWriteWeb, etc.) that Violet Blue and Ben Metcalfe’s domain “vb.ly” was seized by NIC.ly (the domain registry and controlling body for .ly) due to the content of the website (“text referring to adult content and offensive imagery from [our] main page”).

What you may not realize is that .ly is the country code Top-Level Domain of the Great Socialist People’s Libyan Arab Jamahiriya – that’s Libya. It’s their country code, people, and represents them, just like .uk for the United Kingdom or .ca for Canada or .gov for US government entities. Yes, we love cruising through ccTLDs for fun new ways to make great domain names, but we Americans (I can’t speak for other nationalities) can tend to forget that not all cultures are as open as ours, as filled with laws and organizations protecting the various rights we often take for granted.

Freedom isn’t free (I learned that years ago at a Halloween biker party, but that’s another story), and not everyone has it the same way we do.

So I have to ask – when shopping for domain name, do we forget to look past the awesome opportunity for a great URL and not evaluate the risk of purchasing a ccTLD  from a foreign country?  Metcalfe was told that the content on the website did not comply with Islamic/Sharia law – apparently there’s a clause in the application where you certify that you’re not registering the domain “for any activities/purpose not permitted under Libyan law.”  In his blog post, he notes that “Libyan Islamic/Sharia Law is being used to consider the validity of domains, which is unclear and obscure in terms of being able to know what is allowed and what isn’t.”

I would hazard a guess that Islamic/Sharia law is pretty clear to those who follow it. Most of us understand how our own law works, and can make an educated guess as to whether or not we’re falling outside of it. Just as I am ignorant of their laws, I wouldn’t expect a Libyan to immediately comprehend my country’s. I have to ask myself: do I want to purchase a domain name for my business if I have to certify that my use of it won’t fall outside of laws I know nothing about?  Especially for a country as different from my own as Libya is from the United States?

Take that one step further – while you know you can control the content you contribute to the site running on the domain, and thereby control the risk, what if you’re a service like Bit.ly or HootSuite’s Ow.ly? By letting your users shorten anything they want, your control just vanished, and you incur risk every time someone uses your service.

It sucks that so many entrepreneurs jumped on the .ly bandwagon only to run the risk of losing their domains. And yes, the timing is a bit suspicious, as they announced back in June that strings shorter than four symbols should go to local Libyan registrants. Kind of reminds me of how for years we were encouraged to use Java, only to have Oracle break out the lawyers after they acquired Sun (here’s a better description of the “entrap and extort” view).  I’m hearing “Hey, here’s a free adorable puppy. You must love it. Look at all the news outlets telling you to love the puppy.  Oops, sorry, we want it back (or, for Java, pay us $50 gatrillion dollars because you did not achieve full compliance to have the puppy).”

In the case of the .ly domains, I think some of the blame falls on us for being willing to buy into it without reading the fine print. And when the tag line for your site is “the internet’s first and only sex-positive url shortener” there’s probably a better than zero chance that those determining whether your content falls outside Islamic/Sharia law will rule against you.  It’s not guaranteed, but is it worth the risk?

Top 10 reasons to participate in the #DCWW #WWT2010 contest

[tweetmeme source=”alisonheittman” only_single=false http://wp.me/pYPzx-1b%5DSo, DC Web Women is raffling off a few tickets to the 2010 Women Who Tech conference. The first contest is going on right now – you just have to tweet a reason why women in technology should be supported, include the hashtags #dcww & #wwt2010. Oh, and you can’t be me, because I’m on the Steering Committee, so I’m disqualified.  Here are the rules.

I’ve tweeted a couple reasons anyway. My pal Kris has a legitimate entry (I don’t think she’s on the SC). And that’s it. Seriously.

Did you miss the part where 140 characters could get you a free ticket to the telesummit? I spent 20 bucks for my ticket. What’s wrong with you??

So here, in no particular order, are my 10 reasons you should participate in this contest:

10. Because you don’t want Kris, the only legitimate contestent as of 4:43pm today, to win.
9. Telesummit = don’t need to figure out the dress code
8. If you don’t know how to tweet, you probably need to learn how to energize your base, too
7. Listen & learn, so you can present next year!
6. Hear fellow DCWW’ers Allyson Kapin, Jill Foster, Ann Yoders, & more!
5. Wrapping up the day learning to tap your Alpha Bitch keeps it exciting to the end
4. Because it’s Rad.
3. Who doesn’t want to learn how to survive an online snark attack?
2. Because you should be able to think of at least 1 reason to support women in technology
1. Free ticket. Duh.

If you’re a member of DC Web Women, I hope this motivates you. If you’re not, well, I hope you participate (even if you can’t win) because it’s great to tweet about supporting the ladies.

Freeish TV

[tweetmeme source=”alisonheittman” only_single=false http://bit.ly/aA7R01%5DI’m married to an early adopter of technology. Usually, that means spending money on something that costs a heck of a lot less a few months/years later. Sometimes, it really works out.

We quit cable over 2 years ago. I should preface this “we’ve-saved-so-much-money” theme by saying that we did shell out for a nice commercial-grade plasma (I see it in bars & airports all the time) a few years before that, picked up a Bose home theater setup prior to that, and have a tuner & computer hooked up to the thing. And an Apple TV sitting there, along with other pieces and parts.

So, anyway, we quit cable, and have been getting all of our TV over the internet. With the exception of some iTunes purchases and monthly connectivity fees, it’s been so free! Not just in terms of cash, but also time. I love the minimum of advertising that we get via Hulu.com or one of the network websites. It takes so much less time to watch a show now!

Sure, there are some shows we stopped watching, but I can’t say that I’ve missed them that much. If they’re worth it, and it’s possible, I’ll shell out for a season (of Torchwood) on iTunes.  Plus, now we catch internet shows, like The Guild.

In February, we took a trip in the way-back machine and bought an antenna (just like when I was a kid) so that we could watch the Winter Olympics. We went to Torino in 2006, so we were really excited to watch our favorites again. And boy, but it’s hard to watch television programming via TV. Yes, the HD programming looks stellar. But the commercials – there are so many of them! I had forgotten just how much time they take, and how disruptive they are. So the eyeTV doesn’t get turned on all that much these days. But hey, at least it’s free. Ish.

Hulu recently announced a subscription model. My main problem is that they don’t get rid of the advertising. I’m willing to give you cash, but that means you don’t get to spam me. Kind of like paying Pandora to to make it ad-free. I’ve got the same issue when I buy a DVD and get 10 minutes of movie previews before the flick kicks in. Grr.  I’ve been living with the free version of the new Hulu, and the only changes I’ve noticed is that a couple of the shows I watch only have a single episode up for a week. That could just be due to agreements with the networks, but I have a feeling that if I was paying, I’d be seeing more. At this point, I don’t care enough about the programming to do more research to find out if paying is worth it.

And that’s what it boils down to – when is it worth it to pay? At what point does getting TV for freeish cost more in time and inconvenience than what you’re saving? At what point do I decide that I like a show enough to pay to watch it? Pay more to watch it ad-free? Spend the time to figure it all out?

I’m excited to see what’s coming down the pike with Google TV, a new Apple TV?, and other gadgets. I’m hoping that they’ll add enough to the viewing experience, that they’ll find new ways of engaging my interest. It’s not that I want everything for free – it’s that I know my time has value, and that I am a self-selecting target for their advertising, so I need more if you want both those things and for me to open my wallet, too.

RANT: You obviously didn’t talk to a woman

[tweetmeme source=”alisonheittman” only_single=false http://bit.ly/bzVf3T%5DI’ve written drafts of this post before, usually when I’m indignantly reacting to something, and it comes off really evil. I’m happy to own any of those drafts if they ever find their way in to the public eye, but I’m doing this a bit kinder at the moment, which is probably for the good.

In case you haven’t figured it out, I’m an American woman. I’m on my second company, and have been involved in enough product development that I’ve had to deal with naming things professionally (and I’m also pretty good with animal names). My company doesn’t deal strictly with American clients, and we try not to limit our product development to American audiences, so I tend to take into account a broader audience when naming things. My check list usually has “non-offensive in all languages and the .com is available” at the top of it.

What you might not know is that I attended a private Christian school from K through high school. I’m second generation – my dad attended, lots of my family, and my sisters all graduated. As a result I missed out on a lot of school yard potty humor and innuendo. My husband Rob gets a laugh several times a year when nicknames for body parts/bodily functions and rude humor go over my head. But there are some words I’m well aware of, and one that really gets a reaction out of me as a woman.

I’m going to be a little indelicate here, but there’s an elephant in the room when it comes to naming. The name of that elephant is “Flow”. Or “Flo” if you’re trying to be cute. To all the guys out there – pretty much any time a woman sees the word “flow” on some level she thinks of her period. And that doesn’t really make us smile. So if you’re trying to be “non-offensive in all languages” try and ping a woman with your ideas along with that dictionary.

There are a lot of women in technology making buying decisions. So what the heck are you thinking when you use a word in your product or company name that will at best make us laugh at you and at worst gross us out? And if there was a woman in the room when you were naming this (or a wife or girlfriend at home that you talk about work with), why the heck didn’t you put the kibosh on this?

One of the worst offenders I’ve seen in the last year is Flowtown. My first reaction was horror at the name (“Is that short for “Aunt Flow came to town for a visit?”), and then hysterical laughter at all the pink elements on their site (now mostly stripped out, just buttons & a little bit in the logo). Followed by a draft of this article… They’re obviously trying to appeal to a female demographic. But they’ve got the trifecta going on – pink on the site, a name that makes me think of menstruation, and a funnel-shaped logo that, thanks to the other 2 things, reminds me of my uterus. Awesome.

Here are some other great offenders (and almost offenders…):

• iPad: Not your period, but the “magical and revolutionary product” you use to deal with it.
• Flowmaster: “Flowmaster is a global software company providing solutions to simulate thermo-fluid systems quickly, simply and accurately…” So they’re simulating a flow? And they’ve mastered it?
• Or maybe Flowmaster: “Flowmaster exhaust systems and mufflers come with that distinctive ‘Flowmaster sound’ available in mild, moderate and aggressive tones.” Because a muffler could master my period. And have a distinctive sound. Eww.
• Payflow Pro: Just because it has “flow” and “pro” – not a good combo. Should I mention there’s a “Flo-Pro” mufflers, too?
• Flow Step: a product name Rob tried to talk me into a bunch of years ago, I think related to a workflow process we developed (and yes, I know that “flow” is included in “workflow”, which kind of makes that use okay, but I still hold this one up to Rob)
• Honda Fit: “Honda originally intended to name the car ‘Fitta’, but shortened the name in some markets, and renamed it completely in others, upon discovering that in several Nordic languages, “fitta” is a popular slang word for ‘vulva’.” (via Wikipedia)

Okay, I get that I might react a bit strongly to the use of the word “flow” in company/product naming. And yes, at times it might be a little excessive. But the thing is, I believe most women will agree with me on some level that it’s an issue. If you at all are interested in marketing your product or services to us, is it smart to use a word that we associate with a bodily function?