An excellent point raised over at Bokardo, which reminds us of a fact we sometimes lose sight of: that designers are marketers. Especially in web design, that’s a controversial point. Sure, the “tech geeks” who spend their days slinging pixels and hacking AJAX code tend to bristle a little at the marketing types, who breeze by in their suits and ties and golf tans on their way to another power lunch, but we have to acknowledge that the product of our work is the first thing every potential customer sees.

The thing that makes the boundary between web design and marketing so distinct is the kind of people each profession attracts. Marketers – the people who work in “sales” – are a different breed. They’re social, talkative, interactive, open, friendly, and persuasive. Web designers, on the other hand, spend all of their time working with machines and designing abstract things like software and graphics on them. So they’re likely to be introverted, intellectual, solitary, analytical, and strong on communications but weak on personality skills. Continue reading →

Maybe Adobe could go in halves with them. Half the time when I ask somebody what they’re running, they say, “Pirated Photoshop I got off of BitTorrent”. Microsoft moans about software pirates stealing their product on one hand, then quietly condones it for the market share gain on the other.

So when I see Gizmodo telling us “How to Get, Install and Play With Windows 7, Pain Free”, and it actually tells you to go snarf a copy off of BitTorrent, I have to wonder if torrents are just going to become the official path to releases and updates. Mind you, this isn’t some Warez pirate site we’re talking about. Gizmodo is part of Gawker Media, probably the most mainstream corporate presence on the web after C|Net and Conde-Nast. Continue reading →

Did that headline get the attention of all you science fiction fans in the geek community? Go-o-od! Gotta get a hit somehow.

Anyway, so The Ellison has this fun little rant on YouTube, where he whinges in true Ellison style about how some agent called him expecting to do an interview for free on a DVD commentary. And he told them, as only Ellison can, to get stuffed. And a web designer posts this in support of the view that web designers are not assertive enough with their pricing policies, too. Continue reading →

The original Myst was one controversial game. It broke ray-traced 3D graphics into the mainstream, became the reason for people to buy CD-ROMs when they first came out, and completely broke every expectation that people had about video games. To this day, the Myst series remains the ultimate accomplishment of creating an absorbing, immersive virtual world. But half the gamers out there today still say they hate it.

Now Cyan has announced their plans to open-source Myst-Online. This is becoming a cliche for projects that take too long to finish and lose momentum. Sometimes it’s the project’s salvation; getting the community involved and letting users take part in the process of shaping it takes care of those blind spots that the company missed, when they didn’t know what the users wanted. Sometimes it’s also the kiss of death; open source projects are harder to monetize and tend to die off after giving birth to their own successor.

3D gaming remains out of reach for the web. The best you can hope for is pre-rendered ray-traced scenes; a 3D first-person shooter even on the level of Half-Life just isn’t doable from a web browser. Even our best Flash, AJAX, and Java technology seems to be incapable of doing more than puzzle games and flat-map games. And before anybody says “Second Life” or “Spore” – that’s running on your PC, with a web connection to a server, same as any MMORPG. And it doesn’t have near the polygons.

We have to wait for computers to get more powerful, but whoops, right at the peak time for the market, computers are slimming down, into notebooks and UMPCs. So when, if ever?

Peter Brittain

Cisco, the name spoken with the most reverential tones in the IT and telecommunications market, has a new push for their hardware’s interoperability with Linux software. The move ties in Yahoo!, who will be working with Digium to deploy Asterisk throughout Yahoo’s global communications net, using Cisco SIP end points on the desktop.

Actually, Cisco has shown plenty of love to Linux in the past, just not in supporting Free and Open Source Software on telecommunications systems. Remember, back in 2005, Cisco internally rolled out Linux desktops to their workforce.

The reason given being, not cost, but because Linux is easier to support! Take that, MSCEs!

And then back in April of 2008, Cisco opened up its ISR routers’ API, with an application extension platform based on Linux. So you might actually compare Cisco more to IBM. They’ve been planning this move for a long time, and they do it like they do anything, in slow, steady steps.

Peter Brittain

Oh, the nail-biting suspense! Which browser will come out on top? The intrigue! The drama! The… the routine.

We’ve actually been watching this fight between Microsoft and Mozilla since 1995, and in fact they’re actually descended from the same web browser. You heard me: Internet Explorer and Firefox. The same parent browser.

Meh, loosely speaking, anyway. The original, the one and only classic, is NCSA Mosaic. Another company, Spyglass, licensed the web browser code. To quote the Mosaic Wiki page:

“Spyglass licensed the technology and trademarks from NCSA for producing their own web browser but never used any of the NCSA Mosaic source code. Microsoft licensed Spyglass Mosaic in 1995 for US$2 million, modified it, and renamed it Internet Explorer.”

So that was at least the technology that went into Mosaic and also got sold to Microsoft. Meanwhile, Mosaic Communications begat Netscape Communications Corporation, producing Netscape Navigator. And lo, Netscape Navigator was eventually released as open source, under the codename of “Mozilla”. Does that name ring a bell? Yes, the same Mozilla corporation which produces Firefox.

The next time you’re in a heated debate with other web developers about which is the better browser or which one will win the desktop war, you can just wave your hand and go “What’s the difference? They’re both at least cousins to each other.” Then point them here.

Peter Brittain

Any blogger reading right now has no doubt bristled like an angry cat at the headline. Blog comments promoting a site immediately suggests comment spam. Well, that’s just what we’re saying: don’t spam! But anybody with a blog that allows comments has seen comments that work, which contribute to the discussion, and then the URL in the comment is tolerated.

The basic method is that you search Technoratti or Google BlogSearch to find blogs in your topic space or niche. Then go there and hopefully leave a comment that won’t get deleted, with a link back to your site.

The important thing is that you make participating in that blog’s community your first priority. Helpfully point out a mistake, add a note and a link pointing out some other aspect of the subject of the post, answer a question posed by another commenter, or even just mention that you also covered another view of this topic on your own blog.

One important strategy that is often overlooked: the sites that already link to you! Whenever a blogger links your site as a reference and you notice some traffic coming from it, go there and leave a comment thanking them for the link… and also fill in your site’s URL in the appropriate field. There, now you have two links, from a site that likes you already! You can also add a link back on your own site, thanking the blogger for mentioning you and pointing your readers to that site for commentary on your subject.

This is how the blogosphere builds friendships.

The important thing is to be a good web citizen above all else. Spam your link to irrelevant sites, or worse yet, hire a third-world freelancer to do it, and you’re heading for trouble and ill will all around. Further tips on blog comment marketing here.

Peter Brittain

Now, don’t get us wrong. When there’s a problem with the website, there’s a problem and it needs to be fixed. Whatever we’re on contract to do, we do. But what perhaps is particularly frustrating is the people problems, since web developers specialize in computers, not people. Sure, you need people skills to get by, but even the fuzziest, warmest, friendliest person would shut their phone off after getting a couple of these…

The micro-manager. – It’s that feeling of constant dis-satisfaction you can sense. They’re somehow convinced that if they just analyze your site long enough, they’ll find something to pick apart. The icons are too small, the gradients could stand to be fuzzier – or why not move the submit button over to the left side of the form? It would be less grating if it were in the specification at the start.

The persecution-complex paranoiac. – 90% of the site owners out there are not conscious enough about the security risks of the Internet, and then you have the 1% who are convinced they are getting hacked all the time. “My website’s been hacked!” No, actually, congratulations! You made the front page of Digg! Unfortunately, the traffic brought your server down.

“I have a nephew who could build the site…” – No, really, that’s OK! Yeah, anybody can web design, in fact, it’s not even a real job. It’s just like shoveling snow, even though some people make a living going door to door offering to do that. Yeah, just a few minutes diddling around with a copy of Frontpage Express and some flashy animated GIFs, we’re good.

The would-be 1337 hacker. – At the other end of the technology scale from the Luddite is the one who knows too much for their own good. Sometimes it’s a real thrill to work with these people – they know what you’re doing and have good sense about it. But then there’s the ones who prove the old saying, “A little learning is a dangerous thing.” And just like that, they’ve introduced bugs into the PHP, converted all the English pages into the Kanji character set, and have somehow made a PNG image which cannot be displayed by any browser. Can you fix it? At 3AM?

The black-hat trafficker. – You try to avoid these, but some slip through the radar. Of course, they’re dishonest by nature, so they lied about their intentions on the way into the deal. But now you’re crest-fallen to discover that that logo you made went onto a dreaded sales-letter page. And the mail server you set up is being mis-used for spam. And the site you so lovingly designed is now a link farm. The worst part is, when Google drops their PageRank to 0, when social bookmark sites blacklist their URL, and when their own web host gives them the boot, guess who gets the blame? That’s right, the web designer.

Peter Brittain

Just saw the new release of a recommendation from the W3C, as usual with W3C announcements, it is depressing.

It is so because we have had SVG way back in 2001, and have had vector graphics since almost the dawn of the computer era. We could have been building web pages out of pure SVG, and never would have had to worry about image resolution, JPG artifacts, or GIF patents. Even bandwidth would have been less of a concern.

Unfortunately, a certain large corporation which controls a major share of the web browser market didn’t want it that way. Continue reading →