Archive for January, 2006
Because I make my living by helping small entrepreneurs with their online marketing efforts, I am predisposed to resonate with the comments of Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos as reported in Grand Forks Herald. In his comments at Marketplace for Entrepreneurs in Fargo, ND he said, “You can physically be anywhere as you do it, and you can affect the entire world with what you build.”
Of course, I doubt Bezos said that online marketing was free of risk or of trial and error. What he did say is that a small entrepreneur can have global impact from any location. I like that!
A local organization that is working to connect local businesses to the global marketplace is the Northern Adirodack Trading Cooperative. Though I may be biased by the fact that I have done some work for them, I believe their goals are worthy of support. Let’s support local businesses in their online ventures and see what world changing impact they can have.
Regional businesses that have made inroads online are:
There are too many to mention, some of them among my clients. Let’s support these innovators and see what positive changes they bring to the north country economy.
A Related Article, Can Tech Save Smalltown America? is available on Slashdot.
January 21st, 2006
On friday, I attended a Dale Carnegie training event at Canton Potsdam Hostpital. The past year has been one of growth in both the size of projects and the number of clients here at my Web design company and I hoped that this class would help me make better decisions about how I use my time.
Larry Heron, the presenter, offered a number of very useful pointers but the highlight of the event was the interaction between attendees. I found that, though I was one of the few who owned their own business, my stresses and challenges were identical to most of the others.
Here are a few of the challenges we identified:
- Eliminating wasted or duplicated effort
- Keeping a clean and organized workspace
- How to handle interruptions and minimize lost productivity
- How to avoid unproductive procrastination
- How to prioritize (Of course, the famous 80/20 rule)
- How to break the stress cycle by interpreting events more accurately
- and, how to delegate effectively
A quote Larry used that stuck with me is this one from Ed Foreman:
“Winners are those people who make a habit of doing the things losers are uncomfortable doing.”
… Not that life is a big contest! It just is a reminder that success doesn’t come from taking the easiest or most apparent path.
January 21st, 2006
Jakob Nielsen, Web usability expert, has weighed in on Blog design mistakes. Visit his alertbox article to learn more about Blog usability.
January 21st, 2006
I learned CSS initially because I was frustrated by the repetitive tasks that the old Web design techniques imposed on me. Removing and changing font tags was not a favorite passtime. As CSS evolved and my ability as a designer improved, I saw other benefits of CSS design. These included simpler code, increased search engine visibility, faster page loads, and even greater accessibility.
Of course, my first attempts at CSS design weren’t always coded with simplicity. I added tags where some simple CSS code would have sufficed. I credit some examples of low clutter templates for WordPress with teaching me excellent semantic coding in XHTML. Though the templates weren’t eye candy, they did get the job done with a minimum of clutter.
My devotion to CSS increased when learned that uncluttered code increased search engine results, provided the content that is on those cruft free pages is actually relevant to people browsing the Web.
Since speed is so important to many people who browse the Web on their dial-up connections, I saw the bandwidth savings of external linked CSS as a great asset. Of course, there is a bit of a frontloading effect. Let me explain. Though CSS in external files is cached in the browser’s memory from page to page, it must be loaded completely on the first page view. Since CSS files do not have to be large to be effective, this is usually not much of a drawback.
Though I do not claim to be a Web accessibility guru, I do see significant advantages to uncluttered HTML code for those on assistive devices such as screen readers. Even for those on small screens, clean code can make a standard page render more usefully.
January 18th, 2006
I purchased The Zen of CSS Design soon after I completed my degree in visual communication. Fatigued by the theory heavy books I had read in school, I was hoping for a project based resource to help me produce quality results quickly. As I read, it quickly became clear that this book is a conceptual analysis of CSS design best practices rather than a step-by-step project manual. Opting for a simpler approach, I left The Zen of CSS Design to moulder in the dust of my bookcase for a few months an moved on to other prescriptive step-by-step volumes.
When a designer friend mentioned how The Zen of CSS Design had helped him think creatively about approaching design projects, I picked it up once more. This time, I didn’t put it down.
Though it took me two attempts to discover the value of this book, I would like to thank Dave Shea and Molly Holzschlag for creating a book on a programming language that is not merely a technical reference or prescriptive how-to manual. The Zen of CSS Design helps me to plan, create and problem solve modern Web designs while thinking in CSS.
- Authors: Dave Shea and Molly Holzschlag
- Paperback: 304 pages
- Publisher: Peachpit Press (February 17, 2005)
- Language: English
- ISBN: 0321303474
- List Price: $39.99
January 17th, 2006
