Posts Tagged ‘web design’

Designing mojoLive.com

Friday, August 26th, 2011

user-unfriendly usability chart

user-unfriendly usability chart

Starting a brand new site is always the best (and scariest) part of any project. Starting off with a completely new concept is at once daunting and fun. Like a lot of web designers, I live in the “form follows function” camp. When you’re building a web application, there really is no other camp you should be in. While I enjoy edgy sites, nothing pisses off the average user like “find the navigation” and “figure out what this site is about.” The average user wants tools they’re familiar with. Tools that don’t get in the way.

That being said, “tools they are familiar with” is not as simple as it sounds. For those of us that have lived and worked on the web for many years have a very distorted view of “user friendly.” We’ve already been trained to use navigation and know what logins look like are.

Once, I saw a user-experience presentation where the speaker called a 70+ year old man on stage. The speaker said the gentleman had never used a computer before. The speaker then asked the gentleman to walk up to the computer on stage and use the mouse (pointing at it) to open the file folder that was on the monitor. The man looked at the mouse hesitantly, then proceeded to pick it up and point it at the monitor like a remote control. We use the computer because we were trained to use it, not because it’s intuitive (sorry Apple, this is true even for our beloved Macs). The same is true for the web experience. While we designers still have to assume a certain amount of web knowledge is present (knowledge of “navigation” and “forms”) it is still our goal to make the most user-friendly, uncluttered and, therefore, enjoyable sites we can.

Today, I spent some time developing some possible UI styles for mojoLive. It’s fun and difficult to create something that’s simple and yet fresh- easy to grasp, yet original. Yet it’s something that us designers and developers do on the web everyday. Either way, I’m totally digging this stage!

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This Month’s Frederick Web Technology Meetup

Tuesday, July 20th, 2010

Mike Guill giving his presentation on "Workshop: Building an accessible call-to-action feature with CSS". He's doing awesome, even without a projector!

Thanks to Maryland Ensemble for use of their classroom! BTW- They're rehearsing for a [re]play of "The Canterbury Tales"- buy tickets for the July 22, 23 & 24 @ 8pm performances here!

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Have a Mac? You Have a Web Server! part 1: Installing Your Server

Monday, March 15th, 2010

This is a 3 part series on setting up a webserver on you Mac- it's my first how-to, so give some feedback, please!

Nowadays, it's incredibly simple to setup a home web server. I've been a Web Designer since 1998 and a Mac user for far longer than that. When I started building websites, serving sites from a Mac was impractical. There was no inexpensive solution- Webstar was the only robust server for the Mac and it started at $500. Along came Mac OSX, and with it, the Unix underpinnings it was built upon. SWEET! the Mac Desktop was now a LAMP platform (Linux-Apache-Mysql- Php), a robust, enterprise-class web server...almost. It wasn't very easy compiling PHP and Apple's installs of Apache and PHP were minimalist...

I'm getting too geeky-speaky, aren't I? Let's get to the meat!

How to setup a robust PHP/MySQL server on your Mac:

Download and install MAMP (Mac-Apache-MySQL-PHP)

The easiest solution I've seen to date is the MAMP Server. It's easy to install, incredibly rock-solid, and FREE (though you can spend $70 to upgrade to the pro version- and I did :)! "MAMP" is a play on "LAMP", which I mentioned earlier.

  1. Download that Beotch!
    Download the MAMP server [here].
  2. Install that Beotch!
    Double-click on the downloaded file and a disk will appear on you desktop.
    Drag the folders to your Applications Folder as they tell you to do.
  3. Run that Beotch!
    Go to your Applications folder, open the MAMP (not MAMP Pro) folder and double-click on the MAMP icon.

Once you startup MAMP, the Apache (and PHP) and MySQL Servers will startup and, BOOM!, you're a web server!

Open a browser, type in http://localhost:8888/MAMP/?language=English and you'll see startup page with links to your PHP information page, MySQL Database admin tool (PHPmyAdmin) and FAQ page.

If you notice the ":8888" after "http://localhost", that's a "port number"- you'll want to change that in the MAMP preferences to "80". That way, people won't have to type ":8888" after your web address to see your website.

The default location for your website files are in the MAMP application folder in the "htdocs" folder- you can change the location to somewhere "less obscure" (like your home folder's "Sites" folder) in the MAMP preferences under "Apache".

Setting up a PHP/MySQL site is beyond the scope of this article, but I recommend this book for beginners :)

Next segment- Connecting your computer to the outside world!

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