I’m not keen on rap music, but this video by The SEO Rapper is worth a view if you’re into standards-compliant web development:

Just had to post a link to this fabulous web portfolio by Bryan Katzel. It has one of the most interesting and innovative uses of semi transparent PNGs I’ve ever seen. Simply scroll down to the bottom and keep an eye on the central area of the page with the rainbow. Gorgeous!

http://www.webleeddesign.com/

Note: Don’t even think about visiting if you use Internet Exploder 6 or lower.

Web 2.0 is not a design aesthetic. Yet that hasn’t stopped thousands of designers perpetuating a commonly understood “Web 2.0″ look: over used shiny reflections, rounded corners, subtle gradients, bold colours and the use of the word ‘Beta’ next to your logo (whether or not your service is actually in beta!)

However, I find the most annoying effect is the now ubiquitous ‘peeling sticker’. It’s everywhere, and not just on the web either. I confess I just don’t get it: what’s wrong with those stickers? Do they use cheap glue? Why are you hiding part of your logo with them?

If you need to bring attention to something on your page, there are better ways of doing so. Good information architecture should lead users to the pertinent areas of your page, without the need for replicating real world physicality in your design elements.

Still, if you really want to perpetuate this aesthetic, you don’t even need to do the work yourself. Just get an app to do it for you. *Sigh*.

GIF and I have been through a lot together. Over the years, we’ve argued over dithering algorithms, we’ve cried over Photoshop’s lossy compression and we’ve drunk the night away comparing palette reduction techniques. Then one day about four years ago, I built a site that required alpha-channel (semi transparent) images. I called up GIF: “Can you do this?”. GIF shuffled about, looked at his feet and dithered his palettes. “Um… no. Sorry.”

I spurned GIF and turned to PNG. PNG was gorgeous. She smiled at me and her IDATs twinkled. “I can do everything GIF does–and MORE!” She laughed, and teased me with her data chunks. She’d got me. I gave her images with alpha channels. She took them in her stride and returned highly compressed, lossless files. I gave her images for dithering; she returned beautiful optimized 8 bit palettes that put GIF to shame. She gave me everything I wanted and I loved her for it.

Everything with PNG was great–for a while. Then one day I discovered the truth. On an idle afternoon I had decided to compare the filesizes of an 8-bit PNG and an 8-bit GIF, compressed with exactly the same settings. The GIF was smaller! What!? My love affair with PNG was being rocked to it’s foundations. PNG had lied! How could she do this to me? (more…)

I was looking at The Wayback Machine recently — a fantastic resource that has been archiving websites for more than ten years. I was trying to find an old site I built that I never kept a copy of, but alas it was not there.

I was disappointed but began to think about the first site I built — it was in 1997 and was version two of Maxim Training’s website, the company I was working for at the time. I punched in the URL and lo and behold, there it was in all it’s framed glory:

http://web.archive.org/…/www.maxim.co.uk/

Looking at this with hindsight, my reaction was “What was I thinking?” I then went and gave myself a good slap.

Look at that lovely textured background! Look at the frames (two levels no less!). It has keyword spamming, a table based design, graphical text, crappy icons (I was sure they looked a lot better than that when I drew them) and a whole host of other things that are now firmly at the top of the list entitled “Big Fat No-Nos of Web Design”.

So what’s the point of highlighting this, other than some self-indulgent, self-berating nostalgia? Well, I think it shows that - despite the web still being an immature medium - we have come such a long way in such a short space of time.

Most of the things that are bad about that site are no longer being perpetuated by good web designers and developers. We’ve learnt so much:

• Sites that use frames stop search engines from indexing your content
• Graphical text is not search engine friendly and is inaccessible to some browsing devices
• Table-based layouts break usability and accessibility
• Keyword-spamming can get you de-listed from search engines
• People associate good design with good content — if your design sucks, no-one will read your content, however useful it might be. I think I’ve got a bit better at design since then!

Of course, we’re still learning. The web is maturing at a staggering rate. It’s becoming easier and quicker to develop new ideas, new ways of interacting with customers and new marketing opportunities. It’s exciting and it is hopefully only going to get better.

I’m looking forward to the day I can write an article about this site and say “What on earth was I thinking?” Well, almost.