With a partner company out of Ft Lauderdale, we’ve redesigned and launched the Engineering Contractors Association of South Florida’s new website.  Included in the site is integration with easy simple calendar, a custom members database with members only content.  All built on wordpress 2.5 to allow for easy updating by the client.

This brought me to relate to this excellent article by Mike West.

I Wonder What This Button Does

The instantaneous reaction to screwing up a piece of a project is, generally, denial. That file wasn’t actually deleted, was it? Changing the configuration didn’t really break the application, did it?

It was. And it did.

Let’s skip right over anger, bargaining, and depression, shall we? You messed up, and your previously exciting weekend is now looking more and more like a frantic struggle to make everything work again before anyone notices.

Problem? What problem?

Happily, there are solid technical solutions for avoiding this sort of mistake. A revision control system like Subversion provides the ability to wrap up all the files associated with a project and manage the changes made over time. In essence, Subversion can act like a time machine, zipping you back to that sublime moment just before you ruined your Saturday.

Even better, you aren’t the only one that Subversion helps. Your whole team can use Subversion in order to moderate the everyday disasters that occur when more than one person tries to work on a project at the same time. Bob and Alice both edited coolNewThing.html? No problem! If they edited distinct pieces, Subversion can automatically merge the changes. If their edits overlap, Subversion notifies them of the exact points of conflict (and, importantly, whose code they’re in conflict with) so that Bob and Alice can sit down together to resolve the issue instead of scratching their heads when their hard work simply disappears.

So how does this work?

Surprisingly little of your workflow needs to change when moving to a revision controlled environment. The process boils down to four basic steps:

1. Make sure you’re working with the most recent version of the project.
2. Do some work.
3. Test your work (and fix the bugs you introduced).
4. Tell everyone else about your changes when you’re satisfied.

You were presumably doing all of these things already. Revision control just makes it easy.

Keeping up to date

In a team environment, it’s dangerous to work with project files that have been sitting on your computer for a while. Other people are working just as hard as you are, and their changes are eventually going to overlap with something you’re about to start playing with. Inevitably, you’ll overwrite someone else’s work, or they’ll overwrite yours. The unbelievably widespread practice of e-mailing zip files around is marginally effective, but it’s an inefficient, cumbersome, and error-prone workaround.

Subversion solves this problem by creating a centralized storage location, called a repository, that acts as the team’s shared source for project data. By managing your project within a repository, you can keep track of all the important changes to all the files you’re interested in.

When I’m ready to start working, I first ask Subversion to make sure that all my files are up to date (as you might expect, Subversion calls this process an update). It compares my working copy with the latest revision of the project in the repository. If any of my files are out of date (or have been accidentally deleted), they’re automatically brought into line with the latest and greatest.

Once I’ve updated my working copy, I know that I’ve got all the important changes up till now, and I can start working without fear of accidentally overwriting someone else’s work.

Doing work

Sorry, Subversion can’t help you here. Much like the homework-doing robots I always dreamed of as a child, the coding-for-you revision control system is still a couple of years off. That said, Subversion does facilitate experimentation and creative freedom, as you’ve always got a “safe” copy to revert to if your experiment fails miserably.

Testing your work

Subversion can’t tell you whether your code works, but it can be a handy resource if you find that your code doesn’t work, or worse, breaks something that worked yesterday.

You’ve got a complete record of all the important changes to your files right there at your fingertips, so you can very easily “diff” your (broken) working copy against the (functional) previous version to see exactly what lines of code you changed. Seeing what’s changed is stunningly useful for diagnosing any issues you’ve inadvertently created, as you’ve narrowed the problem down to a very specific subset of the total project.

Distributing your work to your team

When you’ve completed a chunk of work, you need to make sure it gets recorded as an important change in the repository and is thereby shared with your team. This process, known as a commit, merges the changes you’ve made to your working copy with the repository, ensuring both that everyone else on the team has access to them, and that the code is safely stored somewhere other than your disaster-prone desktop.

Importantly, Subversion doesn’t just capture the changes from revision to revision; it also captures context by allowing you to enter free-form notes along with your committed changes. Rather than just dumping a few new files into the repository and sending out an explanatory e-mail that will be forgotten as soon as it’s read, you can record the content of those changes directly in the repository. When Bob’s got questions or accidentally creates a conflict with Alice’s revision, he can just check her change log and see that she:

• Added a snazzy sidebar to `coolNewThing.html` and modified style rules in `coolNewThing.css` to support it.
• Changed the default link colour to periwinkle blue, per customer request.

This is critical information, and it’s kept right there with the files where it can do the most good. Embedded context is light-years better than a forgotten e-mail, and is reason enough to implement Subversion.

Next steps

Obtaining Subversion is a trivial process. Just grab the distribution appropriate for your operating system and install it. This will load the client and server utilities onto your machine.

Setting up and maintaining a “real” networked Subversion server for a group is beyond the scope of this article; it’s really a task for your friendly sysadmin or IT department. That said, many web hosting services provide Subversion repositories as part of your hosting package, and there are a few excellent companies that specialize in hosting repositories.

For a quick taste, I’d highly suggest looking at O’Reilly’s excellent (and Free) Version Control with Subversion, which has a stellar Quick Start that walks through the process of creating a locally hosted repository, and interacting with it. This walkthrough covers about 80% of your interaction with Subversion, and is well worth the read (and purchase, for that matter).

Additional resources

If you’re already comfortable with the command line, you’ll be pleasantly surprised at how simple it is to integrate Subversion into your everyday work. If not, there are a number of brilliant GUIs that make Subversion a breeze for those disinclined to pop open Terminal and type svn up every morning and svn commit every few hours:

• RapidSVN is a cross-platform Subversion GUI that wraps up pretty much everything you’ll need into a fairly well laid-out interface.
• Eschewing a traditional GUI, TortoiseSVN directly integrates with Windows Explorer, offering an intuitive, file-based mechanism for keeping your project up to date.
• Many text editors and IDEs can directly interact with Subversion: Xcode, TextMate, BBEdit, Visual Studio, and Eclipse are the tip of the iceberg, check your favourite!

Finally, there’s a lot that Subversion can do for you that I haven’t mentioned yet. Branching, tagging, post-commit hooks, and other useful features are described in detail in the book I mentioned earlier: Version Control with Subversion. It’s a comprehensive look at what Subversion does, how it works, and best practices for it’s use in your projects.

Sandy Gold, make.up efficianado, recently contacted Maifith Design about upgrading her website to a next generation solution.  Using wordpress 2.5.1, Maifith transformed her blog, www.happiface.com, into a beautiful and easily usable website.

Using Wordpress 2.5, we re-built the site from the ground up using the latest technologies available.

Ryan wanted more interactivity with his site so we added built the investment calculator and added the tools page to house it.  More tools will follow in the future.

He is ecstatic about the new design and so far the new site has driven traffic up 235% since launch.

TravelYucatan.com is very happy with the speed of the new site and future-proofing of it’s new infrastructure.

The Wordpress team has done an excellent job of cleaning up the UI and streamlining the posting process.  They have made it clear to the end user what the software is meant to do and how it should be used.

I will continue to use Wordpress for my clients websites regardless of their size.  I just recently built a site that will house thousands of articles and a very complicated layout structure and will be viewed by thousands of people daily.  I didn’t even bat an eyelash when I went to choose Wordpress as my preferred CMS client.

• find the websites they seek,
• find content within websites, and
• rediscover valuable content they’d found.

He used his arsenal of talent for planning, writing, coding, and analysis to create websites that could connect with a target audience.

Although Findability had a closely knit family, he felt like an orphan, because his siblings always seemed to get the lion’s share of time and attention from the folks in the web design agency. Everyone fawned over the curly-haired, rosy-cheeked twins Information Architecture and Usability who put everything in its place with a label that all would understand. Project Management garnered everyone’s respect for his deft communication, confident leadership, and his well-pressed, khaki trousers. Although Development was a little nerdy and shy, everyone admired his brilliance—from which he created an artificially intelligent search algorithm in just two lines of code. Super-hip Design was the cutest of them all. He seemed to win top accolades all by himself whether his siblings joined him on a project or not.

Everyone seemed to have their place in the project life-cycle at the web design agency; everyone but little Findability. Occasionally someone would notice his value to a project, but instead of giving him the care he deserved, they’d just fork over copious amounts of cash to ship him off to his sketchy uncle SEO, who tied him up and fed him keywords all day long. He spent so much time at uncle SEO’s that everyone started to think Findability was SEO, and subsequently became a little dubious of his importance.

Although Findability felt ignored or misunderstood, he knew that if he was given a chance, he could ensure that the brilliant work of his talented siblings reached their target audience. If only he were appreciated as much as the others, he could alleviate much of the everyday frustration that so many users experience when searching for information to solve their problems and satiate their curiosities.

But what could poor Findability do to be brought into the fold, to be loved and appreciated as much as his siblings? He just needed an advocate at the web design agency to promote his virtues.

That, dear reader, is where you come in. For the unfortunate moral to this sad little story is that we are the ones missing out by not making Findability a priority in what we do. There’s much to gain if only we recognize its value.

Why You Should Care About Little Findability

Despite its invaluable benefits to our work as web professionals, findability is tragically misunderstood, or worse—overlooked entirely. Perhaps we get so caught up in our respective disciplines that it’s simply lost in the shuffle. Maybe findability is on our radar but carries a negative stigma because it’s perceived as search engine duping SEO. Either way it seems that findability is left in the cold because we don’t understand it and don’t see where it fits into our process.

The fundamental goal of findability is to persistently connect your audience with the stuff you write, design, and build. When you create relevant and valuable content, present it in a machine readable format, and provide tools that facilitate content exchange and portability, you’ll help ensure that the folks you’re trying to reach get your message.

A website that ignores findability is whispering into the wind, hoping that someone passing by might catch a hint of its message. To further complicate the chances of reaching your target audience, a cacophony of other websites are vying for the same commodity—attention.

Findability is a multifaceted subject that touches every sub-discipline of our industry. Because each member of a web production team has a part to play in making a website more findable—including project managers, information architects, copywriters, designers, developers, and usability experts—it can’t be put off to the end of a project and it can’t be pawned off on uncle SEO, who will micro-focus on search. To do so is a waste of time and money. There’s more bang for your buck in educating everyone on your team about the boons of findability, and their role in achieving its goals.

Speaking of bucks, there’s money to be made by finding a place for findability in your project life-cycle. The more findable your content is, the more likely it will be the commercial success you’d hoped. Any client that has hired you or your agency to create a website that will connect them with their audience will appreciate the integration of findability strategies into your services. It could be what separates you from the other guys, and helps you win projects at higher bids because of the value it adds.

Bottom-line benefits make findability an easy sell to a production team and clients alike. They can be summed up with a simple equation:

findable content = increased profits

What’s not to like about that? But in order for findability to be effective, it needs to be understood and embraced by all who plan, design, and build the web.

Rally the Troops

To become an advocate of findability in your organization you’ll need to have a sense of the role each team member plays in its support.

Project Managers

A project manager’s understanding of the project life-cycle, and talent for coordinating disparate members of the team, are key to getting findability the attention it deserves. If a project manager understands the value of findability to the business and communication objectives of a project, she’ll make sure everyone else understands, too. She can also educate the client on how the team will make the website successful by focusing on findability each step of the way. It’s an easy way to make it onto your client’s Christmas card list.

Information Architects

Much of what an information architect does already addresses the second goal of findability: to help people find the content they seek within a website. IAs do their darned best to understand the target audience’s behaviors so they can devise systems that will best facilitate content retrieval.

Why not go a step further and help users find the content they seek on the site before they arrive? Using tools like Google’s Adwords keyword research tool or WordTracker, IAs can discern which terms should be integrated into the site’s content to help users find the site through search.

Sites that use tagging systems like Magnolia, Flickr, and Digg also provide insight into search behaviors, as each user defined tag illuminates the way in which users label content for retrieval. Simply search for a term you think people might use to find your site, then check out the tags that are associated with the items returned. It’s like peering inside your users’ heads!

Because information architects have a more intimate knowledge of the content they’re organizing than a third-party SEO company, they can assemble a master list of keywords and phrases to help users find the site. The copywriter can then integrate the keywords and phrases into new or existing content. The keyword master list should also be shared with developers, so they can mark up the content with semantically meaningful tags, to communicate the importance of these terms to search engines.

Information architects can also plan to include tools to promote findability, such as site-wide search systems, tag clouds, “tell a friend” messaging systems, and links to share content on social networking sites.

Copywriters

A copywriter must carefully integrate keywords into the site’s content without stuffing the page. If a keyword appears too often or without articles, prepositions, and other words common to natural language, search engines might suspect that the content has been dishonestly loaded to attract search traffic. There’s no need to over-stack the deck; just incorporate the keywords where it seems natural to connect with your audience via search engines.

Of course, writing brilliant content is the biggest findability aphrodisiac. It promotes return visits to your site, and encourages your audience to tell others about it. That’s why a good copywriter is worth her weight in gold!

Designers

A good designer directs a user’s gaze like a Jedi performing mind tricks on unsuspecting storm troopers. Through the power of contrast a designer shows users where to look, and in doing so, can help them discover tools that will foster findability.

Elements such as the search box, RSS feeds, sitemap link, or mailing list subscription form are all key to helping users find what they seek, and rediscover the site later. Mailing list and feed subscribers are likely to return often to revisit content they found valuable or discover new content. The more frequently a user returns, the more likely they are to complete one of your business goals such as buy a product, make a donation, or get involved with your cause.

Developers

Developers—or more generically anyone who builds web pages—are central to findability, as they construct the conduit for our online messages. The way content is delivered can make the difference between findability bliss and the misery of obscurity.

Web standards and findability have a closely intertwined, symbiotic relationship. Semantic markup helps define the information hierarchy of your content so search engines can more accurately understand your message and direct users your way. The mass of redundant formatting code that web standards eliminates from pages improves the ratio of content to code, which can provide a modest search engine ranking boost to your site and expedite indexing.

Building content to be accessible to disabled users and those on alternative platforms helps ensure that roadblocks do not impede search engine indexing. A progressive enhancement approach to building interfaces that use JavaScript or Flash is an important part of clearing these roadblocks. Search engines won’t be able to see content loaded or hidden by JavaScript, and won’t as accurately understand the information hierarchy of content trapped in Flash movies.

Microformats are a powerful tool developers can use to make content portable to other platforms and devices. For example, event and contact information marked up with hCalendar and hCard respectively can be migrated to applications such as Google Calendar or downloaded to desktop software using the Operator toolbar. Portable content can be kept at your audience’s fingertips to be found when it’s needed most.

Tim Berners-Lee’s grand vision for the web was to keep it open to all users and accessible to the scripts and machines that serve us. That’s the path on which we’ve placed ourselves as advocates of web standards, and it’s one that will also move us towards a more findable Web.

Usability Experts

Usability experts inherently pursue findability by evaluating the degree to which a site is navigable. They can also evaluate how easy it is to find the site via search engines and check page rankings on target keywords that were defined by the information architect.

Traffic analysis tools like Google Analytics, Mint, and CrazyEgg provide detailed information about user behavior on a website. Usability experts can use these tools to identify findability pitfalls, learn where users are or aren’t clicking and what content is most relevant, and even watch videos of remote user sessions using ClickTale. Traffic analysis tools provide valuable information that helps improve findability long after the launch of a site.

The Orphan Finds His Place

Regardless of your discipline, there’s a place for findability in your work. By giving it proper consideration in each step of your project life-cycle, you can create more successful websites that will better serve your clients’ (and their users’) needs. Although the unfortunate story of the sad orphan named Findability had a gloomy start, it needn’t end the same way.

One day a smartly dressed employee of the web design agency discovered little Findability sulking in his cubicle.

“Hey, little fella. Why so glum?”

“No one really gets me. Heck, people don’t even seem to know I exist!”

“Well, I know who you are. You’re Findability! Don’t you help connect people with the information they seek?”

Immediately Findability perked up, surprised that a friendly stranger had recognized him.

“Yeah, that’s exactly what I do!”

With a warm smile, the agency employee said, “Come with me young man. I’d like to introduce you to my team.”

by Aarron Walter

We at Maifith Design are committed to testing and using new software for our clients.  We will be testing this application and giving our own review of it in the days to come.

For more information on Magento visit www.magentocommerce.com/

We get better design when we understand our medium. Yet even at this late cultural hour, many people don’t understand web design. Among them can be found some of our most distinguished business and cultural leaders, including a few who possess a profound grasp of design—except as it relates to the web.

Some who don’t understand web design nevertheless have the job of creating websites or supervising web designers and developers. Others who don’t understand web design are nevertheless professionally charged with evaluating it on behalf of the rest of us. Those who understand the least make the most noise. They are the ones leading charges, slamming doors, and throwing money—at all the wrong people and things.

If we want better sites, better work, and better-informed clients, the need to educate begins with us.

Preferring real estate to architecture

It’s hard to understand web design when you don’t understand the web. And it’s hard to understand the web when those who are paid to explain it either don’t get it themselves, or are obliged for commercial reasons to suppress some of what they know, emphasizing the Barnumesque over the brilliant.

The news media too often gets it wrong. Too much internet journalism follows the money; too little covers art and ideas. Driven by editors pressured by publishers worried about vanishing advertisers, even journalists who understand the web spend most of their time writing about deals and quoting dealmakers. Many do this even when the statement they’re quoting is patently self-serving and ludicrous—like Zuckerberg’s Law.

It’s not that Zuckerberg’s not news; and it’s not that business isn’t some journalists’ beat. But focusing on business to the exclusion of all else is like reporting on real estate deals while ignoring architecture.

And one tires of the news narrative’s one-dimensionalism. In 1994, the web was weird and wild, they told us. In ‘99 it was a kingmaker; in ‘01, a bust. In ‘02, news folk discovered blogs; in ‘04, perspiring guest bloggers on CNN explained how citizen journalists were reinventing news and democracy and would determine who won that year’s presidential election. I forget how that one turned out.

When absurd predictions die ridiculous deaths, nobody resigns from the newsroom, they just throw a new line into the water—like marketers replacing a slogan that tanked. After decades of news commoditization, what’s amazing is how many good reporters there still are, and how hard many try to lay accurate information before the public. Sometimes you can almost hear it beneath the roar of the grotesque and the exceptional.

The sustainable circle of self-regard

News media are not the only ones getting it wrong. Professional associations get it wrong every day, and commemorate their wrongness with an annual festival. Each year, advertising and design magazines and professional organizations hold contests for “new media design” judged by the winners of last year’s competitions. That they call it “new media design” tells them nothing and you and me everything.

Although there are exceptions, for the most part the creators of winning entries see the web as a vehicle for advertising and marketing campaigns in which the user passively experiences Flash and video content. For the active user, there is gaming—but what you and I think of as active web use is limited to clicking a “Digg this page” button.

The winning sites look fabulous as screen shots in glossy design annuals. When the winners become judges, they reward work like their own. Thus sites that behave like TV and look good between covers continue to be created, and a generation of clients and art directors thinks that stuff is the cream of web design.

Design critics get it wrong, too

People who are smart about print can be less bright about the web. Their critical faculties, honed to perfection during the Kerning Wars, smash to bits against the barricades of our profession.

The less sophisticated lament on our behalf that we are stuck with ugly fonts. They wonder aloud how we can enjoy working in a medium that offers us less than absolute control over every atom of the visual experience. What they are secretly asking is whether or not we are real designers. (They suspect that we are not.) But these are the juniors, the design students and future critics. Their opinions are chiefly of interest to their professors, and one prays they have good ones.

More sophisticated critics understand that the web is not print and that limitations are part of every design discipline. Yet even these eggheads will sometimes succumb to fallacious comparatives. (I’ve done it myself, although long ago and strictly for giggles.) Where are the masterpieces of web design, these critics cry. That Google Maps might be as representative of our age as the Mona Lisa was of Leonardo’s—and as brilliant, in its way—satisfies many of us as an answer, but might not satisfy the design critic in search of a direct parallel to, oh, I don’t know, let’s say Milton Glaser’s iconic Bob Dylan poster.

Typography, architecture, and web design

The trouble is, web design, although it employs elements of graphic design and illustration, does not map to them. If one must compare the web to other media, typography would be a better choice. For a web design, like a typeface, is an environment for someone else’s expression. Stick around and I’ll tell you which site design is like Helvetica.

Architecture (the kind that uses steel and glass and stone) is also an apt comparison—or at least, more apt than poster design. The architect creates planes and grids that facilitate the dynamic behavior of people. Having designed, the architect relinquishes control. Over time, the people who use the building bring out and add to the meaning of the architect’s design.

Of course, all comparisons are gnarly by nature. What is the “London Calling” of television? Who is the Jane Austen of automotive design? Madame Butterfly is not less beautiful for having no car chase sequence, peanut butter no less tasty because it cannot dance.

So what is web design?

Web design is not book design, it is not poster design, it is not illustration, and the highest achievements of those disciplines are not what web design aims for. Although websites can be delivery systems for games and videos, and although those delivery systems can be lovely to look at, such sites are exemplars of game design and video storytelling, not of web design. So what is web design?

Web design is the creation of digital environments that facilitate and encourage human activity; reflect or adapt to individual voices and content; and change gracefully over time while always retaining their identity.

Let’s repeat that, with emphasis:

Web design is the creation of digital environments that facilitate and encourage human activity; reflect or adapt to individual voices and content; and change gracefully over time while always retaining their identity.

She walks in beauty

Great web designs are like great typefaces: some, like Rosewood, impose a personality on whatever content is applied to them. Others, like Helvetica, fade into the background (or try to), magically supporting whatever tone the content provides. (We can argue tomorrow whether Helvetica is really as neutral as water.)

Which web design is like that? For one, Douglas Bowman’s white “Minima” layout for Blogger, used by literally millions of writers—and it feels like it was designed for each of them individually. That is great design.

Great web designs are like great buildings. All office buildings, however distinctive, have lobbies and bathrooms and staircases. Websites, too, share commonalities.

Although a great site design is completely individual, it is also a great deal like other site designs that perform similar functions. The same is true of great magazine and newspaper layouts, which differ from banal magazine and newspaper layouts in a hundred subtle details. Few celebrate great magazine layouts, yet millions consciously or unconsciously appreciate them, and nobody laments that they are not posters.

The inexperienced or insufficiently thoughtful designer complains that too many websites use grids, too many sites use columns, too many sites are “boxy.” Efforts to avoid boxiness have been around since 1995; while occasionally successful, they have most often produced aesthetically wretched and needlessly unusable designs.

The experienced web designer, like the talented newspaper art director, accepts that many projects she works on will have headers and columns and footers. Her job is not to whine about emerging commonalities but to use them to create pages that are distinctive, natural, brand-appropriate, subtly memorable, and quietly but unmistakably engaging.

If she achieves all that and sweats the details, her work will be beautiful. If not everyone appreciates this beauty—if not everyone understands web design—then let us not cry for web design, but for those who cannot see.

Originally from A-List-Apart

Bliss Holistics is an information site created for Michelle. She contacted us with a simple request; for a website with a blog that was easy to update. We chose Wordpress as the content manager/blog tool as it has the most robust features and is the easiest to use.