izzat Archive at Digital Gaia SNS

Author Archive for izzat

Don’t Damage Your Professional Image

Published

on July 27, 2008

. 0 Comments

There’s tonnes of tips out there that pinpoint designs that exude a more professional appearance, but me being a noob designer (that’s why we have Luqman and Pudin), I’ll pick another scope to feel good about myself :). And hopefully share some prohibited practices that are still not considered a taboo.

DotCom Professionals

First impression always count. That’s a result of human imperfectness, but keep that in mind and you’ll be far better than being ignorant.

Your corporate website is your most far-reaching front office, so you’ll loose more prospects if they arrive and found out what a cowboy your business is. So here’s some things that you should be aware of if you want to keep your corporate website higher on the professionalism scale:

1. Don’t Use Free Email Host

Never, never sell a business or services which cost hundreds and tell them to contact you at —-@yahoo.com or —-@gmail.com. Being thrifty is not always a positive attribute, and you’re just increasing the suspicion that you’re a scammer. If you have a domain name, just head on to Google Apps and you can have your own GMail attached to your own domain. Free.

2. Check Your Email Designation

Even if you have your own email addy, the designation is as important. Don’t use webmaster@yoursite.com. When people want to contact you, most probably they’re interested about your business, and not “Hey, nice header. How do you make it transparent?”. Using ‘webmaster’ as designation also tells the reader that their email is being directed to your 3rd party developer. Use your official designation (marketingmanager) or better still, use your own name.

3. Don’t Put External Advertisements

“Our business aims to deliver a world class service through principles Ads By Gooooogle Want To Make Money? Learn How You Can Earn 2 Billion in 2 seconds we believe brings the best out of our client’s project”.

Got it? It’s nice to reap in a few bucks on the way but don’t tell your customers that you’re too desperate for cash. It’s like selling unrelated product during your product sales presentation.

4. Don’t Let Updates Be ‘Outdates’

We don’t call the unification of Germany a news. We call them history. If you have your news or updates section and it wasn’t updated for about a year, ditch them. Or maybe relabel them as ‘Archive’. Or guess what. You can also update them. That’ll be nice.

5. Don’t Has A Grammatically Errors

Pun intended. This is an old, classic, rhetoric advice. If your website is a static website, for once get someone who don’t read Icanhascheezburger.com to double-check before it’s even published. Like Arnold Scharzenegger said, “I don’t care if it hurts 5 minutes during the filming stunts, all I care is that the scene is perfect. Because the film will be watched for years.” Trust the termina-tah. (er..Luqman..you’ve checked ours rite?)

6. Don’t Leave Any Trace of a Free Blog Host

Out of the hype, some businesses jump on the bandwagon and decided to write a blog. Good. But don’t direct them to your blog with ——.blogspot.com address. Blogger.com and Wordpress.com now have a redirect service, so use them. And there’s always people crying about Blogger unprofessional appearance, so at least swap the default template and change the favicon. Unless of course, you intend to run a corporate splog.

7. Don’t Use (Obvious) 3rd-party Widgets

We like widgets because they provide great utilities, hassle-free. But if you’re keen to use them on your website, customize their appearance so that it looks like a native feature. Remove any ‘Powered by widgetbox etc.’ And if you like the MyBlogLog recent visitors, at least blend their design with your theme. I don’t actually recommend you using any 3rd-party widgets, but if you can cloak their 3rd-partiness, go ahead. But read their TOS first so you can prepare a logical excuse if you’re caught.

8. Don’t Use Blog Format

This is a controversial issue. I know, I know, for instance WordPress can be as good as any CMS. But more often than not, you’re not designing it to appear like a proper corporate website. Blogging platform tends to carry similiar characteristics- the 2-3 columns look, the comment section, the chronological trace, the ‘written by —- at ——p.m.’.

Regular people don’t actually notice them, but your corporate website (except news, updates etc.) should not carry any time-sensitive information, or risk your visitor thinking “I wonder if these infos still apply today!”. Unless of course your business is the WayBackMachine website.

I believe everything that’s important come in 10. So I must miss a couple of things. That’s for you to figure out and share!

2 Invalid Reasons To Use Tables For Layout

Published

izzat

on March 24, 2008

in Code, Design, Trends and Usability

. 0 Comments

I stumbled an interesting write-up about top websites that are still using tables. No, the commentaries are not that interesting (using tables doesn’t mean that these websites are not adhering to the design trend), but the writer’s effort must be commended.

It’s nice to see which big-guns are adopting CSS to the max. But more importantly, it’s nice too see a flaming discussion there and another one here between tables and css proponents.

If you dig through the comments, there are several reasonable inputs regarding why you should still consider using tables for your layout structure. However, these comments below carry none of them:

Taking The Easy Way Around

Anyone who’s ever had to do a truly complicated layout on a website, knows that tables are a necessary evil.

If the boss doesn’t care how it gets done, as long as it gets done, and you have a deadline, and tables work consistently across browsers with no hard tweaks, so you use tables, get your work done before 5 PM so you can go home and enjoy the life outside of work…

Regardless I personally prefer tables, as I’m a programmer not a designer, they’re easier to work with for us than CSS.

Without tables i’d keep kicking my coffee over…

We’ve been webdesigning for about 7 years now, and I don’t what is the problem with tables. Easier to manipulate, faster to put out.

Being Ignorant

Who cares! If it works, who cares! Your CSS fanboi’s really need to spend more time making your sites look less cookie cutter web 2.0 and actually start making them useful.

Safe and reliable…always….why go with new conventions or at least the more common convention if good old faithful puts out?

Customers don’t care if it’s CSS or tables.

As long as it gets the job done… Google breaks a lot of other standards, but hey, as long as it gets rendered in the browser properly…

Honestly. Who. Gives. A. Shit.

If the website works well, like google.com, who cares how it works underneath?…I think someone needs to step outside, the average net user doesn’t even know what CSS is and they don’t need to, it doesn’t matter.

Well guess what, I have 150+ clients and I use tables on ALL their websites..

*******

Personally, of course I’m all with CSS, but until consistent CSS rendering is applied across all browsers (damn IE!), table is always a great temptation. If you read through the comments there, you’ll understand why.

However the comments above doesn’t echo the same perspective, and thus reflect poorly on their professional standard, their desire to give the best on each project, their awareness towards the evolving web standards and their concern about simplifying their project for their client’s further use.

Think of your client. And your future.

Seriously, I’d understand if people still using tables for fear of cross-compatibility issues. But using it because you want the easier and quicker way out will be very unfair to your clients. Of course they don’t give a damn. Chances are you can just give a full image-page for their website, and they will still be happy.

But semantics matter. And file size too. So does the client, in fact, if they decided to alter the design themselves.

And standing by your table repeating ‘as long as it work!’ ? Of course it will work (and I think always will), but then you can still save some money buying old VW Beetle - and pay the hefty cost for maintenances. On the other hand, you’ll spend more bucks on a new Honda, but chances are you can use it for many, many years to come, hassle-free..

Which CSS will play a greater role by then. Start mastering the CSS now. Or you’ll have a bleak future in web-designing.

WordPress 2.5: Will It Finally Challenge Other CMSs?

Published

izzat

on March 19, 2008

in cms

. 1 Comment

The team at WordPress, despite the delay, has finally announce that the newest version, 2.5, is ready and stable for release. But not just yet. They’re giving the benefit of a doubt by having a final round of public testing before the stable version is released to the public. You can download the Release Candidate 1 here, or log into the demo site here (username: admin; password: demo).

If you’re a WordPress user, certainly you’ll get a peek into these updates in your dashboard, therefore I will not go into the details hare. If you’re new to WordPress, let me sum up what the hype is all about.

Simply put, WordPress is an open-source, free blog publishing system which enables users to quickly publish their blog. However, the software was initially positioned as a blog publishing tool, meaning it is more suitable for text-intensive, chronologically-based content rather than a full-fledge multimedia website. You can download them here.

It is however, becoming more and more flexible, especially the excellent coding structure which enables complete templating of the look and feel (PHP hacking needed). I’ve seen some websites that managed to completely (almost) disguise the WordPress platform they use.

But certain fields are still left to be desired. The notorious problems with third-party video embed (like YouTube), the absence of a page layout & content management and the lack of plug-and-play accessibility (without any code hacking) still put WordPress way behind other CMSs like Drupal and Joomla.

Will the 2.5 close the gap?

According to the Release Candidate announcement, these are some of the improvements the 2.5 will carry:

A customizable dashboard
multi-file upload
built-in galleries
one-click plugin upgrades
tag management
built-in Gravatars
full text feeds
faster load

Some of the above hint towards a more capable blog publishing platform, with a better post management system, latest comments and incoming links display, blog stats, and a cool addition of user choice of their own RSS feeds into the dashboard.

But WordPress 2.5 is also pushing beyond the blog format- which will widen the appeal to non-blogger and pure web publishers. Notice the addition of multi-file upload (now you can easily host files or create download directories), built-in galleries (create a media center) and one-click plugin upgrades (thus being more of a platform system rather than a standalone software).

Faster load time will also help (CMSs are not that popular in terms of loading time). 2.5 also simplifies some of its interfaces, and focuses have been given to ease the process of new post publishing.

But sadly, 1-click access to other functions are still unavailable, since the back-end navigational menu still doesn’t incorporate drop-down structure. If you’re in the dashboard, you have to first click “Design” and then click on “Theme Editor” to edit your template. The steps could’ve been simplified by using a drop-down menu. I wonder why they overlooked this.

Summary

Already a milestone ahead of other blog publishing platform like Movable Type, TypePad and B2Evolution (which shares some common DNA), the 2.5 is better equipped to be a full-fledge CMS like Joomla.

But still, they’re still far away. So, I reckon if you do not see blogging as an important element for your business, you’re still better-off in other CMSs. If you’re looking to build a community, boy, WordPress is definitely not for you.

Not just yet. But with the current rate of development and adoption, I can see WordPress will be comparable to the CMS leaders in 3 years time.

They already have their own native forum system, thousands of third-party plug-ins, and millions of widgets - which can transform WordPress sites from being just blogs. They also have membership structure with Access Control Level. They have group publishing features.

So 3 years is a reasonable time.

Have A Great Intranet Without The Price For Your Company

Published

izzat

on March 1, 2008

in Companies and Tutorial

. 0 Comments

Having an internal networking system (intranet) is a great tool to boost internal collaboration between employees. But as many company realizes, these systems cost a dime to implement. Thus it is only limited to big companies with IT budget reaching 7 figures.

Open Source CMS

Well, there is a good way to acheive the same result withut costing your arms and legs. Open-source Content Management Systems, or open-source CMS for short, is a powerful tool that can act as a collaboration platform for your company’s need.

And we highly recommend companies, especially those small to medium SMEs with offices geographically scattered, to implement one.

Here’s why CMS is an all-around solutions for your company:

You can have it as your official website. You can easily update the content of your website without any programming knowledge. You can even alter a whole lot of features for your website, like page structure or navigational menu. These actions are no longer limited to web developer- now you can have the power in your hands.
It can function as a membership-based website, with different Access Control Level (ACL). With this membership features, you can set the access level and privileges your registered user can have. Hide sections and pages according to your user- different level of employees, vendors, customers etc..
It can perform as a dynamic communication channel. Forum scripts, for example, is a great way to encourage internal discussions which can include image and files attachment. Therefore related documents can always be downloaded where the action happening.
It has member profile system, where each user can have their own page where information about them can be displayed. Turn these pages into your employees details page, where when combined with the search function, it is a powerful employee directory for internal use.
It can be cheap. There’s so many open-source CMS available today that gives more and more ability for smaller companies to leverage this powerful tool. We’ll cover some of the best in future postings, but overall, these open-source CMS is a viable alternative for companies to implement their internal networking capability without the 7-digit budget.

The only drawback of using this cheaper alternative for internal networking is you have to host the system on the world wide web, exposing your system to

bigger security threat
capped bandwith usage
volatility of your ISP’s internet connection

But it’s still a useful system for SMEs that can be achieve using tremendously lesser budget. How low is low you might ask…Well, if you have an IT exec who knows some bits of web development, you can have your own all-rounder intranet system for free! That is if you don’t mind the bland default look of course

Using Visual Flow

Published

izzat

on November 2, 2007

in Design and Usability

. 1 Comment

When you are organizing the layouts of your web page, consider the visual flow, which should guide your web visitor from their point of first focus to your message. For instance, if you are putting an animated banner with dark color, use static and lighter colored content below it, helping your visitor to first focus on your banner and gently scrolling down section by section so none of your content will be missed.

If you use a similarly dominant element like a crowded and heavy picture on the bottom of the screen, visitors would most likely focus on the banner then directly to the picture, making them undecided on what to focus next.

They can become lost in your page, lessening their interest and attention level - which proves to be a costly mistake in delivering your message. Use contrasting BUT complementing elements and colors, but don’t apply too much variety- or this will happen!

Contrast will separate your content from the design, while complimentary elements will reduce your visitor’s conflict for attention. These should help them to effortlessly absorb the content of your website one by one - making your site browsing not just enjoyable, but effective as well. Look at how this site use a banner, large vertical top sections with icons, a small row of images and decreasing size of texts to guide your attention flow.

Web 2.0 design?

Published

izzat

on October 31, 2007

in Design

. 0 Comments

A hectic week this is, but luckily I got some time to do some reading on the net. The hype nowadays among web developer is of course the web 2.0, and currently designers are very concern to produce websites that is up to this standard. Let’s focus now on the web design aspect first where we will cover the programming part in later postings.

Although still debatable (and controversial sometime), there is loose definition on the term itself, making it harder for designers to create a standard guideline in designing a website. Gradient? Rounded edges? Flash?

Design wise, I got a great site to share. According to the page, among the crucial (but not in certain cases) approaches in web design for the 2.0 bandwagon are:

Simplicity
Central layout
Fewer columns
Separate top section
Solid areas of screen real-estate
Simple nav
Bold logos
Bigger text
Bold text introductions
Strong colours
Rich surfaces
Gradients
Reflections
Cute icons
Star flashes

From our definition here at Digital Gaia, web 2.0 is not really design-centric. It’s not about beauty. It’s all about user experience. It’s about delivering your message in a very pleasing way that it can enter your web visitors mind effortlessly.

Of course beauty will always help, but don’t let it detract your message away. The elements above will mostly help as it is the trend of beauty- in the eye of the general web user, not in the web developer’s.

The question: Does your web visitor belongs to the general group? Sometimes, your targeted web user might be those senior citizens, which rich media content might annoys them. Or they might be located in low-speed internet access areas, who find the extra loading time for those heavy yet subtle detailing (and sometimes mega-rich flash animation) painful.

Consider your web user carefully, and choose a design theme that can accommodate their needs and preferences, not yours.

Beautiful Website or Functional Website?

Published

izzat

on October 27, 2007

in Design, Marketing and Usability

. 1 Comment

Imagine this:

You are a superbly talented and creative web designer, resourceful and possess the most complex techniques in designing a website. When you are designing your client’s website, which way should you approach? A dynamic and outrageously beautiful website, or a simple static website?

Some of you might ask first: what is my client’s budget? Or some prefer: what is my client’s objective? Then you proceed with the first question. Well, I should mention, you miss a couple of crucial questions:

What is their message?

A website should always focus on the intended message, whether it is to sell product, present news, encourage people to sign-up or inducing brand images. And all this should relates to the next question.

Who are their targeted visitor?

Websites are for web visitors, not you, not your clients. It is your job to find the right way to present your client’s messages to their web visitors. Web visitors, and not your client’s customers.

So,when designing a website, understanding the challenging programming languages or possessing the gifted creative talent is no guarantee for a successful web design. You must understand your client’s whole business and possess a critical view of communication. Your approach can vary heavily in this stage.

Designing the best website takes some time. Understanding your client’s business takes most.

Author Archive for izzat

Don’t Damage Your Professional Image

2 Invalid Reasons To Use Tables For Layout

WordPress 2.5: Will It Finally Challenge Other CMSs?

Have A Great Intranet Without The Price For Your Company

Using Visual Flow

Web 2.0 design?

Beautiful Website or Functional Website?

Favorite Us!

We tweet too!

We're on Facebook!

Latest Posts

Buzz 2.0