Puffbox

Jakob Nielsen's latest Alertbox suggests that people read web pages in a shape resembling a letter F: one horizontal line across the top, a second horizontal line lower down, then a vertical scan up (or down) the left edge.

Two of Jakob's three conclusions are just your basic 'inverted pyramid' thinking: 'Users won't read your text thoroughly' and 'The first two paragraphs must state the most important information'. But the third is new and a bit more challenging: that you need to put the important keywords at the start of subheading, paragraphs and bullet points.

ClickZ: After searchers type in a brand-name query on a search engine, only 85 percent end up at that brand’s Web site, while the rest are diverted to competitor’s sites, comparison shopping engines and affiliates.

Which means that one in seven, despite knowing exactly who and what they want, end up going somewhere else to get it.

Yes, the web opens up all sorts of new markets to you. But equally, and this is a point I often make in presentations to government audiences in particular – it opens up your market to other people. Even if your business, like government, hasn’t been subject to ‘competition’ before.

Finally got access to Joga.com, the soccer-based social site from Nike and Google… and I'm really quite disappointed. The login process is tortuous, with no obvious purpose. Does it want to know about me as a football player, or as a fan? Seems to be a bit of both. Once you finally get through the lengthy forms, you're left with a disappointingly empty 'homepage'. I expected there to be a library of photos and videos for me to start pinning to my page… but if they're in there, it isn't obvious. And when I try to upload some JPGs of my own, I'm told they are corrupt (eh?).

This should be a brilliant community site. A space on the web for you to customise with photos and videos of your favourite players and teams. A grafitti wall on which to scrawl your thoughts on the sport. A chance to engage in a bit of good-natured banter with fellow fans, and your team's local rivals. But, certainly at first glance, it isn't really any of these. And I really don't feel inclined to work at it, to make it better for myself or anyone else. A missed opportunity, frankly.

Of course, the snag with listing all my latest del.icio.us bookmarks publicly is that it reveals what I'm up to on a daily basis. Yes, I confess, I'm doing some experimentation work with blogging engine Typepad. But not strictly in connection with a 'blog'.

I've mentioned here before that I'm a big fan of using blogging engines as Content Management Systems. For minimal cost – in this case, less than £70 for a year's service – you can be up and running in next-to-no time, with a website offering WYSIWYG authoring, reasonable workflow, good search, automatic RSS feeds, subject categorisation, basic traffic stats – plus blogging bits like comments and trackbacks if you want them.

Perhaps most importantly, there's a great choice of authoring tools. In the past I've been a big fan of w.bloggar, which works well with Typepad – although for my own purposes, I'm currently favouring the Deepest Sender extension for Firefox, which may not. Plus of course, for the seriously tech-challenged, there's always the option of posting via email… just send an email to a given address, and it'll get posted automatically to the blog. Brilliant.

The Typepad experience has been a bit frustrating, but ultimately fruitful. Setting up a blog with their default designs is (predictably) a doddle. But my plan was always to build completely customised templates, integrating with the host site's design. They have a selection of pre-coded 'modules' (ie. includes) which are supposed to help, but I just found they got in the way. The help documentation isn't especially well organised, either. But having (eventually) found the right pages in the knowledge base, it's been fairly easy to produce the templates… and I'm very pleased with the results. I hope to get them live shortly.

I’ve been in this business for a dozen years now. I’ve never lost my passion for it, but you know, for a couple of years there, it wasn’t especially exciting. IE had won the browser war, and wasn’t going anywhere. Google was just a search engine. Nobody had broadband. The iPod and iTunes were but a pipe dream.

Suddenly, we’ve got the whole web 2.0 thing going on. I get a real buzz using the new web-based services, things like Ruby On Rails, Flickr, 30boxes or Meebo. It’s a reminder of the pioneering spirit which built the industry in the first place. One person with an idea, and a smattering of tech knowledge, can produce something in weeks which can change the future. We’re seeing it on an almost daily basis… just look at the Techcrunch blog, for plenty of examples.

Which may explain why I’m feeling very restless in a corporate environment just now. The Web 2.0 phenomenon proves it is still possible to produce great results in minimal time with minimal resources. But what about the corporate environments? I wouldn’t ever have believed that increasing the resources would actually increase the time required. But I believe it now. I achieved much more in the first four years of my career than in the last eight… and that really hurts.

I know I’m not the only one thinking like this. I know too many (exceptionally) good people with similar experience in the industry, all showing signs of restlessness. We were drawn to this business by the sheer pace of progress; and now we find ourselves in comfortable corporate jobs, where timescales are measured in years not weeks, growing increasingly frustrated and angry. Guys… we know we can do better than this.

If things seem a little quiet round here, there's a very good reason for it. After several years of loyal service, it looks like my hard disk is about to give up. Blue screens of death are becoming a daily occurence (and often more than once). I've already done one complete Windows re-install… and whilst that has its benefits, giving an immediate performance improvement, it hasn't solved the problems. So my priority just now is keeping the machine going.

It's been quite an interesting experience, actually. Faced with a clean XP installation, what are the programs I simply had to reinstall immediately? The list, if you're interested:

• AVG antivirus and Kerio personal firewall (naturally)
• Microsoft's free SyncToy, to keep the backups ticking over
• Firefox (with all personal settings and extensions restored from a copy of the portable version – an unexpected benefit!)
• Outlook and ActiveSync (restoring all my calendar and contacts from PDA!)
• Skype
• Winamp
• Desktop Sidebar (I can't live without it, apparently)
• OpenOffice.org
• Photoshop Elements (which I thought for a nasty minute I'd lost entirely)
• Picajet

Plus, of course, all the usual drivers etc. I'm still coming across other things I suddenly remember I need; but that's the list for now.

I’m startled by the number of websites which – even these days – are being designed for one browser, one screen resolution, one usage scenario.

I’ve just completed a coding exercise which involved me displaying other people’s web pages inside an ‘iframe’. I couldn’t believe how many of the sites wouldn’t fit inside a window of width 780px, without a horizontal scrollbar.

Granted, the majority of users – maybe two-thirds on a typical site – are using 1024×768 monitors, with the browser usually expanded to full-screen. Fewer and fewer people are on 800×600… so we can be a bit complacent now, can’t we?

Er, no. Look in the shops. At one end of the spectrum, you’ve got widescreen monitors offering wider viewing areas, and graphics cards with outrageous resolutions, so wide that it’s virtually impossible to read pages which don’t force a (reasonable) width.

At the other end, I’m slowly seeing more and more people browsing the web on handheld or portable devices. My PDA gives me 640×480 (how old-skool!), and smartphones are typically 176×220. What crimes against layout will your site commit on those? If you’ve never tried, borrow someone else’s handset, and brace yourself.

The good news is, we have the tools to deal with this. For example, CSS lets you specify one presentation for ‘screen’, and another for ‘handheld’. But it’s shocking – and frankly inexcusable – how few sites actually implement it.