Blogging!

Oh the irony… I'm about to cause a total paradox… I'm going to blog about blogging. I'm sure I'm not the first person to do this, but if the people that access this blog are the people I hope they will be, namely my clients, I thought I'd go ahead and put together a short how-to on the subject.

Why Should I care? - Consider Blogging a marketing effort.
I'm sure you're no stranger to the idea of sending out a newsletter to remain top-of mind with your clients and prospects. Blogging is a natural extension of this. Now, many people try o send out newsletters via email. This is a very solid and sound tactic. Unfortunately, it's also a task that al too often gets put off, ignored, and as a result happens far less frequently as it should. This is one of blogging's biggest appeals. Blogging is a relatively coarse medium. There's no need for polish or refinement. It's a come-as you are medium. Just string together a few paragraphs to make a point and you're in business. The tools make it easy, and there's no danger of spamming.

But the big deal is this - People find websites via search engines, and search engines like text information. A great way to get found is by sharing information in a blog. You can provide your contact information right in the blog itself or link back to your website.

How do I get started? – You're already halfway there!
Well it's alarmingly easy, especially if you're already here. You can do as I did and head straight to www.blogger.com. Sign up for a free account, create a title for your blog, pick a design template and start typing. Presto-change-o! You're now a blogger!

Now blogger has it's share of critics and many people feel that www.wordpress.com is a superior product. I'm not as familiar with it, but blogger.com is completely free. It's a good place to get your feet wet in this world of real-time publishing. Good luck and let me know how it works for you!

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.