The Art of Exploding Gracefully

Modern web design is largely a house of cards. It is a series of hacks piled on top of one another to achieve an intended design or function. The limitations and inconsistencies of browsers are a huge part of this problem. The second part of the problem is lack of consistent adoption of tools that are secondary to HTML programming such as cookies, JavaScript, CSS, Flash, and Active X controls.

While using these tools works for the majority of visitors, they can’t be relied on exclusively. Websites need to have a plan B. This means taking the time to incorporate backups when the mainstream techniques fail. This isn’t as easy as it sounds. The “mainstream” techniques are elegant, or just plain sexy. The alternatives are messy, kludgy and generally not fun to build or use. But if you don’t have a backup plan, your website explodes and is completely dead to the users that don’t meet your exact specifications. Consciences developers don’t exclude large audiences just because they use a different browser or plug-in. They address minority audiences by providing alternative tools. Or better yet, they abandon the proprietary tools and create new standardized tools that work for larger portions of the web world.

A client recently came to us with a piece of software in hand, very excited about what we could accomplish with it. The problem was that it only worked in Internet Explorer… and only on PCs. You just can’t do that. Netscape may be dead but the “browser cold-war” is in full swing. FireFox is now used by more than a third of all web users. A few years ago, Firefox was barely a blip on the radar. Now it’s mainstream and there’s no going back to an IE-only world.

Now Macs are a different story. The latest W3 Schools stats put Mac usage at less than 4% of the surfing population… regardless of whether their using Opera, Safari, IE or Firefox. While you cna't ignore the non-mainstream world, you also can't cater to the lowest common denominator. I know this won't make me popular (especially among creatives) but the simple truth is that this splintered sub-faction of the internet world really doesn’t matter from a practical standpoint. Yes, it’s important to make sure sites work on Macintosh platforms but it isn’t worth spending an inordinate amount of time making sure everything renders out to the exact pixel. Until Mac adoption becomes more widespread, a certain degree of "exploding" can bee seen as an acceptable loss… as long as it explodes gracefully.

Friendly Fire in the War on Spam – Part 3: The boy who cried SPAM

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3

There are many people out there who run legitimate email newsletters. Newsletters provide useful information to subscribers and they are a great way for companies to stay in touch with their client base. Those who send newsletters have to be very careful about how they handle their mailing lists. Most people who send newsletters are careful and concerned about stopping spam. The CAN-SPAM act is a good starting point, but those who care about their customers agree that these are probably the most important "best practices" for sending email newsletters:

• Use a self-managing mailing list or service
• Include unsubscribe instructions with every email you send
• Require a double-opt-in for new subscribers (Double opt in refers to the process of signing up for a newsletter then requiring a confirmation response from the email address that was sent. This way an email address cannot be added by an imposter)

Even with all these precautions legitimate emailers get flogged as spammers. But these are skilled, tech-savvy people who seriously oppose spamming. How can they be accused of spamming when they've been so careful? The sad answer is that it happens when a legitimate newsletter is flagged as spam by one of their own subscribers.

The double-opt-in signup makes it impossible for an email address to be accidentally added to a mailing list. Someone has to choose to subscribe and then verify their wish to subscribe. But a month later, they may have forgotten all about it. They complain to an ISP about this spammer or hit the "Spam" button on their email client. Just like that, the emailer has been accused of spamming. The consequences of being accused of spamming can be drastic and swift, often resulting in non-delivered emails and blacklisting. The anti-spam movement is so strong right now that an ISP might immediately deny service to the newsletter sender. This happens without any crime being done, without any proof, and without any warning to the person managing the newsletter.

What's most alarming about this problem is that there really is no defense against it. This is a problem that is totally out of the control of people who use email legitimately. Email recipients have been empowered to take on spam. People have a lot of rage when it comes to spam and they have no qualms about practicing mob justice. Apparently the AOL email interface is particularly empowering when it comes to accusing spammers by providing a large spam button… that has serious consequences.

The only solution may be to abandon email newsletters all together. As RSS technology becomes a part of the daily lives of mainstream internet users we ca see an alternative to using email to deliver content. There can be no argument about who is subscribing to RSS information. The recipient requests the information only when they want to, or when their reader has been programmed to.

Interestingly this corresponds nicely with the advent of blogging. Blog content authoring tools can easily be directly liked to RSS feeds. By inviting site visitors to subscribe to your RSS feed, they get a much greater amount of anonymity and you get a huge drop in stress and no possible way of being accused of spamming. But for the moment, you can't reach the same audience with RSS that you can with email. But t writing is on the wall. RSS, or more precisely the idea of RSS as a means of people gathering up information that they like will likely replace the "pushed" architecture of the email newsletter in time.

Friendly Fire in the War on Spam – Part 1: Filters

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3

Not only is spam incredibly frustrating, it continues to hamper legitimate business in new ways. Sending out honest email newsletters is becoming increasingly difficult for a number of reasons. Most of these are the direct result of entanglements with tools and protocols that are in place to protect users from spam.

A big problem with spam prevention today is that most anti-spam software can report "false positives" where legitimate email is labeled and treated like spam. The spam filtering software looks over an email message if it fits the profile of spam. This can be done at the server level, an IT department's Exchange server, or at the client level, a copy of Outlook or Eudora on a desktop. The problem is that determining what is spam and what isn't spam is a very delicate job. Unfortunately most anti-spam software just isn't up to it. You run the risk of either tossing legitimate email in the trash without seeing it or only eliminating a small fraction of incoming spam. Granted that cutting out half of the spam you receive is a positive step but it's hardly an ideal solution especially when you loose real email in the process.

Dealing with incoming spam:
In my experience, most anti-spam software causes as much hassle as it prevents. This is especially true for people like me who depend on email for new business leads. Those of us in this situation simply cannot afford a false positive because that costs us business. For a long time my solution was to run a spam filter on my email client at a low level. Set this way it would flag obvious spam and let the rest through to my inbox for me to deal with. I still had a ton of spam coming into my inbox but it wasn't quite as bad. Even with a low grade filter I had to skim through my spam folder once per day to look at hundreds of emails to avoid throwing out something important.

The problem with these types of filters is that the software is making a guess. Emails that have blank subjects or subjects like "hello" or "hey" look a lot like spam. Heaven help you if you actually happen to be in the mortgage business or work for Pfizer.

Better than filters:
Since software isn't up to the task of determining what is spam and what isn't spam what can we do? Cloudmark has developed a unique and quite brilliant solution to the problem. Rather than rely on software to make judgment calls on what is or isn't spam, Cloudmark leverages the opinions of millions of email users. Here's the process in a nutshell: The vast majority of spam is a basic message that gets sent to a large number of people. Everyone with Cloudmark's software has the option to mark an email as spam. When a message gets marked, Cloudmark reads this as a "vote" to label a message as spam. When a message gets enough "votes" Cloudmark's software gets updated and removes future occurrences of that message from everyone's mailbox. The genius of this is that Cloudmark only marks something as spam if several people have marked it. If you get a new business lead from an individual, there is no way that email can be flagged as spam by Cloudmark because it is a unique message. No one else has received the email other than you, so no one else could have marked it as spam. No more false positives!

The ups and downs of Flash

Even if you're on the web for a few minutes a week, you have undoubtedly seen a website (or part of a website) developed in flash. Adobe Flash is a very important part of a developer's toolkit these days. However, it's important to note its limitations.

One main limitation that Flash is that it is notorious for is updateability. Many Flash developers in the early days created a website that was strictly Flash, and many of them had to tell their clients how everything was now going to take twice as long and cost twice as much to make changes. And don't even think about having the client update the site themselves. Flash's development environment is more complex than a traditional HTML development environment (for example Adobe Dreamweaver). In Dreamweaver it takes about 4 clicks to insert a photo. With Flash it takes many more, and you also have to deal with organizational aspects of that image within the development environment itself. In short, there's just more you have to deal with when you insert a photo in Flash, not to mention every other aspect of development.

Another limitation (although I use the term "limitation" looser here) is programming. Flash uses a language called Actionscript. Actionscript is very powerful and also easy for a developer to learn since is similar to other languages. You can use Flash to connect to and update databases, and you can create some very powerful web applications with it. However, the Flash environment is based on a timeline. It gets very difficult and confusing to put pieces of code all over a timeline, and Flash can have many timelines in one file. This issue has been addressed in more recent versions of Flash, and it has helped. But it is still a persistant issue. I'm sure Adobe will work on this more in future versions.

So for now, what can you do with Flash? Currently, many developers treat Flash like a "component" in a website. It isn't the whole website, but a few pieces of it. Games, video, and animations, Flash when used correctly can add a lot of "punch" to a website.

Internet Marketing Strategy - Tech vs. Creative

There is a traditional battle in web design between the technical people and the creatives.

Tech – "What good is a website if no one finds it?"
Creative – "What good is being found if no one does anything with it?"

I tend to think of myself as a "creative" (although my background might speak to the contrary) and I'm usually an advocate for the creative aspects of web design: supporting the brand message, dedicating resources to interface design, and refining usability. Getting my "creative way" has often meant headaches for the technical folks and vice versa.

Back in 1996, many were of the opinion (myself included) that SEO (search engine optimization) was a fool's errand. The eyeball economy had not yet started. There was so little traffic in niche markets that it didn't seem worth the effort to compete in search engines. Conventional thinking was that you'd be better off with a compelling "destination" website, some traditional, proven marketing techniques, and fundamental SEO tactics rather than spending exorbitant resources competing for search results with no guarantee of any ROI. However, the web has changed a lot since then and we need a new web-marketing paradigm.

The amount of information accessible online today is incomprehensibly large. While this makes the Internet a fantastic resource, finding information can be daunting and being found online is extremely difficult. Enter SEO. The arguments traditionally made by programmers and technically-minded web developers carry more weight today. The reality of the modern congested webscape is that being found is 90% of the battle… maybe more.

Even though Google provides 600 trillion results, we know most folks typically don't go more than about 3 pages deep. So why bother? Because of these two modern realities:

1. The cut-off really IS that abrupt. Back in the day you could count on a few people to power through the first 10 or so pages of results looking for your site. Today content is more abundant as there are more sites offering up information and search engines are getting smarter. Today the top 30 results are actually close to relevant! So instead of having to sift through the first 10 -20 pages of nonsense, search engine users can actually find good information on the first few pages of results.
   


2. The payoff is huge! There are so many people out there using search to find so many things every day that the number of searches preformed, and the resulting number of clicks, visits, and purchases is so high that if you manage to get into the top 10 results the amount of business that this yields will likely be enormous (provided you haven't made any other gigantic web design/marketing errors).
   

So what does this mean? It means that SEO is no longer trivial. It's still a risk, but making it to the top of results has a huge pay off.

In short, getting found through search has practically become an all-or-nothing prospect. And the "all" is so big that even a website with terrible design will do well because even the small percentage of visitors that make it through the poor design will still be a large number.

Now don't think that SEO is a silver bullet. There can only be 10 sites in the top 10 and all of your competitors the world over want to be there just as badly as you do. SEO is less about a marketing strategy and more about trench warfare… with about a million trenches. Know what you're getting into and don’t think of it as a single ad or even a single campaign. SEO is a long, process of modifying, tweaking and monitoring. Search engine rules change and content is always king. It's nearly impossible to stay ahead of the curve. The trick is to keep up with it enough to surf.

Rackspace = Fantastic!

I though I'd write a few words about a company that makes me glad I'm in the web design business. Rackspace has been a truly extrordinary company to work with. The quality of their service has been outstanding. Every time I speak to someone there they are happy, up beat, knowledgable-- or have ready access to a person who knows the answers. While the quality of the ingredients (hardware, bandwith, etc.) is top of the line, what stands out is the quality and availability of the people.

That isn't to say that they have a team of all-knowing Internet gods on staff 24-7. I have been able to stump them a few times. (To be fair, these stumper questions were about email management software. Something that was not part of their offering and really doesn't pertain to hosting directly.)

I think the best part of their servce has been their complete willingness to either walk me through operations I was not familiar with or just take over the process and fix things to my specifications. Rackspace is the kind of company that stands for quality in the true meaning of the word and I'm very pleased to be doing business with them.

The Rise and Fall and Rise and Fall of image use on websites

Text Origins
For a long time the World Wide Web was composed primarily of text. HTML tags provided some basic formatting for paragraphs and relative font sizing. This first version of HTML was created by scientists and was not meant for exacting page layout.

The Rise
As the WWW started gaining popularity, more geeks (and I use the term endearingly) started to play with HTML. As a former scientist I can vouch for the fact that most of these guys don't have the greatest sense of esthetics. So as they started to get "creative" with design, the choices that were made could be called… questionable. This is how we ended up with cloud backgrounds, rainbow bars and animated GIFs of dancing cartoon animals.

The Fall
When the Internet started gaining popularity and widespread use in the mid 1990s, images were still rare and often of low quality. Digital cameras were just becoming available at low resolutions. File size was a real concern for web developers as 14.4 modems were the standard of the day. The first real web designers were faced with primitive tools and HTML was being pushed to its limits. Bandwidth restrictions made quality images a practical impossibility.

Of course this didn't stop people from using images. "Traditional" graphic designers created sites that relied heavily on images to get around the shortcomings of HTML. By using images, designers had complete control over typography and layout. The result was a slide show of still images. While these sites captured the designer's vision, they were very slow to load and were completely unusable to web surfers with accessibility needs (blind, etc.). There was also the gigantic repercussion these sites were almost completely invisible to search engines. Long load times and poor search engine performance has made this practice very rare.

The Rise
Once broadband Internet access began to permeate the market, giant images didn't seem like such a bad idea. Even video streams have become practical and expected over the Internet. While still largely invisible to search engines, image over use was no longer the bandwidth hog it had been. This has give rise to online photo services and photo sharing networks. This type of data exchange was unthinkable in 2000.

The Fall
Now, with the wide adoption of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) there is finally a chance to format page layout without resorting to images. CSS doesn't provide the level of font control most designers want but we are closer than ever before. Pages can be formatted rather beautifully using only CSS techniques. By adding just a few well chosen images and CSS layout techniques, an entire site can be given an esthetically appealing design with code alone.
As a web developer, I've spent many years mocking up designs in Photoshop and then translating those concepts into web pages. Often many key images would be sliced-out of these PSD files and incorporated into the HTML layout. Now with CSS, many of the things which had to be created with images (navigation rollovers for example) can be created with a few well chosen lines of CSS. While CSS isn't perfect, it has re-prioritized the way I approach design. I find myself looking to build as much of a layout as possible using CSS. It's amazing to see how much more you can accomplish (from a design perspective) building a website with just code than you could a few years ago.

I know the arrival of CSS is old news, but it recently struck me that the adoption of CSS has fundamentally changed the way we approach web layout. CSS has become so practical and well documented (including the hacks) that web layout is in the hands of programmers just as much as it is in the hands of web designers.