Puffbox

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.

Another new blog to keep an eye on – Heather Hopkins is an analyst with Hitwise, who produce insanely addictive ranking lists of the most popular sites in goodness knows how many different categories. In the private sector, it's all about tracking the competition; in the public sector, it's a great way to see who's making a success of the web, and more interestingly, who isn't.

I get a regular sight of Hitwise's rankings of central government websites, and it's always fascinating. The top site, virtually every month, is Job Centre Plus, typically followed by the taxman and the Met Office, with Directgov climbing steadily. People are often surprised by how few of the 'big name' government departments make it into the top 20; instead, the sites people actually use are the sites that do something for you… like taxing your car, or selling you a personalised number plate.

I made a passing reference to this the other week, but there’s some interesting new data on Microsoft’s Channel 9… also known as legendary blogger Robert Scoble‘s day job.

The idea behind the website is reportedly the ‘channel nine’ you get on in-flight audio, which lets you listen to the pilots’ radio communications. The theory is that, if you can hear them calmly flying the plane to its destination, you have no reason to be scared. (I don’t know if there’s a ‘kill’ button which the pilots press if things suddenly get scary.)

It’s a brilliant concept for a company, like Microsoft, with an image problem. It’s very easy to hate Microsoft. It’s very easy to hate Windows when you see the dreaded ‘blue screen of death’ (which is starting to happen on a daily basis for me.) It’s very easy to hate the richest man in the world.

So Scoble et al take a camcorder round the company’s offices, and chat to the ordinary staff about what they’re up to. The production values are minimal (editing? what’s that?) but that makes it all the more authentic. These are the people who build the tools that make your day easier (er, usually). They are normal guys. They are smart guys. They care about what they do. And suddenly it’s a bit more difficult to hate them.

Now Scoble has some (almost) hard data to prove its worth. Channel 9 is ‘the #1 most referred to thing by college recruits’. So not only does it have soft marketing benefits, it’s a hard business tool, too.

I’ve long believed there are lessons here for government. We have the same image problem. We have similarly good, hard-working, intelligent, committed people. Why not be a bit more open about the practical difficulties of doing things that look simple?

As ever, Gerry McGovern’s weekly email on website management is provocative. ‘The primary purpose of web navigation is to help people to move forward,’ he writes this week. ‘It is not to tell them where they have been, or where they could have gone.’ He uses a great illustration, not without merit, but which misses a key point:

Let’s say you’re out driving. You come to a junction where you are offered a choice between heading to New York or Boston. You take the road to New York. Would you find it useful to be constantly reminded that you can still turn around and head to Boston?

This would be a fantastic analogy in a linear medium like road travel, but the web isn’t like that. Particularly when something like half the traffic of a typical website comes through Google, and you can’t ever be sure where someone is going to land. If they strike it lucky, and land on the perfect page, that’s brilliant. If not, they’ll need some kind of clues as to where they need to go next.

The more dominant Google becomes, the less likely people are to start at the homepage, and work their way through. Which makes design and IA all the more difficult.

I mentioned before that I'd bought a cheap Trust tablet from Tesco's a few weeks ago. Well, due to a small accident resulting in the more-or-less total destruction of the accompanying pen, I've had to say goodbye to the Trust tablet. Instead, I bought a new one from the recognised market leader, Wacom… and I can't say enough about it. The Volito2 is under thirty quid from Amazon, and you won't believe how much better it is than using a mouse.

A story on the website of BBC News itself… ‘BBC used to entice cyber victims’. But, er, it doesn’t do that any more? 🙂

The Myspace phenomenon continues, with a staggering 66 million people in ‘my network’ – and apparently, a quarter of a million new members a day. I’ve taken a bit of time to find my way around it, and I’m actually amazed by the depth of the music coverage. Yes, you’ve got profiles for the Arctic Monkeys and James Blunt. But you’ve also got grown-up acts like Coldplay, Gorillaz and the Flaming Lips. Oh, and the likes of Neil Diamond and Johnny Cash. It’s almost at the stage where any musical act you can think of has a representation, and a taster of their music. Myspace as the musical Wikipedia, anyone?

The design (or lack thereof) is still doing my head in. No getting away from it; it’s an ugly site, with a criminal lack of easy customisation options. It seriously needs some Ajax magic dust sprinkling over it. It’s hard to believe there’s not a single RSS feed in there. And if they think the kids won’t find a way to turn the streamed audio into MP3s, they’re kidding themselves.

But it works. And it works because it’s a repository for the stuff you want to know about bands. A bit of (high quality) audio, release news, tour dates. And a chance to get your name up there alongside theirs. News International is probably right; it does have the potential to be ‘iTunes 2.0’.

Simon Waldman is right… the addition of a photoblog by the Guardian’s star photographer Dan Chung is a real gem, and probably the most consistently strong feature of their new Comment Is Free editorial/blog thing. It’s particularly good to get his insight as a snapper into how things like photocalls work… for example, HM Treasury’s press office would do well to read his assessment of last week’s Budget set-piece. My only criticism is that it seems a bit petty not to include the pictures themselves in the RSS feed. If they’re looking to monetise it, shouldn’t they at least be charging Canon for all that lovely product placement?

I knew Google was the dominant search engine in the UK, but I didn’t realise it was quite so dramatically ahead. WebSideStory reckons Google has a UK market share of (near enough) 75 per cent, with Yahoo topping the list of also-rans on just 9.3 per cent. So if you’re doing any SEO work, there’s really only one engine worth worrying about.

One of my favourite web projects of the last few years has been Channel 9, also known as Microsoft blogger Robert Scoble‘s day job. They take a camcorder round the various project teams at Microsoft, and get the inside scoop from the guys who do the actual work. Guess what? They’re normal guys who are really knowledgeable, and really passionate about what they do. And suddenly, it’s hard to hate Microsoft. A goofy home video effort is proving more effective than the company’s megabucks marketing efforts.

But this offering from IT publisher ZDNet takes the DIY video thing a step further. ‘At the whiteboard‘ is – guess what? – somebody explaining a topic in a few minutes by drawing on a whiteboard. Granted, you might get two cameras, and a little bit of editing… but it’s the same basic point-and-shoot, zero-production-value ethic. And it works rather well.

Don’t underestimate the power of scribbling. Some of the most effective presentations I’ve ever given were during my time at Microsoft, when I had access to a Tablet PC. The ability to scribble on top of PowerPoint slides, like on a whiteboard, is a huge advance. I’ve had similar success with a more primitive method, beaming slides on to a whiteboard.