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Whenever a web designer designs a site they should always be aware of SEO and how to maximize the sites “trollage” by search engines. More-so, whenever copy is made for the web it should always be written in the best way to get the most Google juice. But even that is not necessary any more.

Website Search Engine bots currently (and in the future will continue to do so) read the sites content and make a keyword relevance table to help find content when searched. That isn’t all of it. The next major part, which Google PageRank uses, is the In and Out links from the site, the sites popularity rank.

Popularity on the internet is key and the more reputable sources you get linking to your site the better your result will be. Having keywords and relevant content on your site isn’t always going to cut it. So no company percieving to be SEO masters can ever get you the best results without that important step of popularity, some do a good job but they can never get you the best result.

You’re better off spamming your Twitter friends and Digg with links and hope that you go viral. That or make a venting blog that will hopefully have some follow through traffic.

News.com.au

This site has just had a recent revamp. For a news site its kind of ok, they are hanging onto some type of print column style layout. But the site design is poorly executed and just doesn’t satisfy the eye. The ugliest part in my mind is the headings for the different sortable content areas, doesn’t fit with the site at all. The functionality of the site is pretty poor and is quite mixed, the dragging areas are a little flawed on non-IE browsers.

GoDaddy.com

Its just pure ugly. Nothing else to describe how bad and cliche Web 2.0 they were trying to be when they designed the site. It has absolutely no thought into User Experience or ease-of-use. It’s just one of the worst sites that one of the largest registrars could have.

The worst part is the right hand sidebar that has that stupid and very poorly executed gradient in it. Web 2.0 is about to die and GoDaddy’s site will have a shelf life of less than 6 months. I found their previous site better, even though it was pretty bad.

Ikea.com.au

Love the products but I hate their Australian site. It’s very crude and not very nice for a company that’s Sweedish when it should be clean, crisp and creative. Navigation and user experience on the site is really just a pain and it will eventually lead you to a dead-end or a server error page.

Revision3.com

Just like IKEA, love the content/product but hate the site. It comes under the failed Web 2.0 redesign attempts. I find the overall design very mixed. The use of gradients and shadows hasn’t been executed well. The background colours is just a mono-tone black with no highlights or interest in it whatsoever. The use of varying components like the scrolling programs listing makes the layout very patchy.

The Rev3 site is one of the sites I want to be able to design myself. I know I could produce a more workable result for them but living in Australia makes me very unaccessible to them, unless they want to fix that I’m sure you may have the same feelings about the site, its ok but it could be better.

Facebook.com

This is a very gray-area ugly site. It’s general design is ok but the new “improvements” are a complete mess. I have gone into detail with these issues in another blog post called “Facebook, Give it a rest already!“.

Released on the 27th of August in 2001, IE 6 was the new browser to be included with Windows XP. IE 6 was an improvement to its IE 5 sibling and at its time, was ok for standards and compliance with CSS and HTML. In the next few years there was plans for the new HTML 5 and CSS 3 spec and other browsers, such as Firefox and Safari, started to include these new specs. IE 6 over time has become more and more behind the times and now is one of our biggest issues in the web design industry.

Why its a problem now

IE 6 and its continued existance can be put down to a few factors:

1. Enterprise and businesses have kept with IE 6 as they believe it to be ’stable’ and more ‘reliable’ than IE7 or 8
2. IE doesn’t have a update checker function nor does it let the user know there are any updates available
3. Your mum and dad users just have no clue how to upgrade (thats when their son/daughter comes in and installs Firefox and deletes the IE shortcut)

And its those main factors that have made IE6 last so long, mainly put down to a fear or lack of understanding of upgrading. 

Usage of IE falling like a rock

Its true, every day you wake up there is at least 1 person that has changed or upgraded their IE6 browser. What good motivation to get up and get designing. Recent statistics have shown that the browsers usage has dropped by 2.27% in the Jan-May period this year. Some would say thats not fast enough, the glass is half empty type of people, and I somewhat agree because the browser is almost 8 years old and should have ideally died completely.

The rate of its demise is hampered by the restriction of upgrading. In statistics by Digg it was found that 70% of their IE6 users could not upgrade because their work said they could not upgrade or that they had insufficient administrator access to their system at work. A further 17% said they didn’t need to upgrade and 14% liked IE6 or had an older system that couldn’t do anything else.

Enterprises slow change

Simply put, businesses need stability and safety. Only IE6 has proven itself in this field thus far. IE7 and 8 are either too Beta or not proven to be secure enough to be in their business, not going to go into how insecure IE is in general. Another frightening fact is that some website applications are exclusively IE and IE6 specifically, I found a government site recently that required this. It makes me furious to think that some developers would be so blind and one-eyed that they would only develop support for IE, even if they are pushed into it or not.

This is the honey pot right here, if businesses change and upgrade to a better IE or to a different browser then we are set. It’s probably not the Sys Admins fault, I know this from personal experience, because upper management might think that Mozilla Firefox is some weird pizza name (I did over hear it called “Mozzarella Firefox” at one point) or their afraid that there will be endless issues with a new browser.

Why support the bloody thing

Ill sum this point up swiftly by a post from @collis:

A few people asked about IE6 traffic.  To most of our sites it’s about 3-4%.  On Tuts+ for example though that = 150k visitors a month

Although a small percentage, that can equate to a lot of users in some cases. If you’re building a website and you have determined the IE6 user base is small then you could pass on completely testing it in IE6 but if you’re making the next Twitter then unfortunately you’ll have to suck it up and deal with it.

The future

There will be a time when us web designers wont have to worry about browser compatibility. But im saddened to say that its time is not fast approaching if the current trends continue.

I went to a site recently and discovered, through a bit of source peaking to find out how they implemented something, that they had used UL and LI elements for almost everything. They had an activity feed style layout and it was comprised of a UL list. The LI elements on this particular page also had DIV tags in them to store the content, complex stuff including avatar with message and so on. Why would you ever use UL and LI’s for a complex list of content?

They should have just used DIV tags to hold the content and the page size would have almost halved itself.

Navigations and lists are fine but content its a big no-no.

Do you have any other stories about website source pet-peeves?

The fact I hate it is because no-one really knows what it means so they assume they know what it should mean. I have head the following keywords from other web designers of what they think Web 2.0 means:

• Rounded Corners
• AJAX
• Search Engine Optimisation
• Badges (pointy, star like ones)
• Gradients
• Bright colours

All the items that mentioned styling are completely wrong (Rounded corners, Badges, Gradients, Bright colours). How these reasons come about is simply due to the trend right now which coincides with the Web 2.0 phase, which should not be mixed. So people assume what it’s related to is the design rather than the actual meaning. AJAX is a method of data communication not a definition of what Web 2.0 is. SEO is just a marketing wank, making a site that search engines can use should be default for all web designers not some addon.

So I did research to find out what it’s true meaning is.

Finding the actual meaning

According to Wiktionary, Web 2.0 is defined as:

The second generation of the World Wide Web, especially the movement away from static webpages to dynamic and shareable content

Source: Wiktionary, definition “Web 2.0″

However, lets not take the Wiktionary answer as “the” definition, more as a guide. O’Reilly which is a trusted publisher of a lot of Website books has an article called “What is Web 2.0″. It has some good points and examples of the change from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0. O’Reilly look at the evolution of websites and new applications for the Web which are apart of Web 2.0 regarding to collective intelligence and data sharing and portability.

The definition is definitely not based on style/design but is more related to how we as users interact with the web. When looking at the changes of the web we can see this clearly, I have seen this myself since I first started on the web.

The change from 1.0 to 2.0

What happened? We saw the web in a new light, that it was a medium for collaboration, discussion and expression of who and what we are. With this realisation the development into the web as a platform from just a presentation medium into web-based applications. A good example is the change from Britannica Online to Wikipedia, discussed in O’Reilly’s post about the Web 2.0 definition. We realised that with the collaboration and an application the web could create, on its own, a website full of information about anything and everything.

With the advent of these changes new methods for using data and interaction on the web changed. AJAX was discovered and then made its way into mainstream usage for user interaction without constant page changes. Better coding methods and methodologies came to be to help the people developing the applications make better ones more efficiently. These are just tools and methods for Web 2.0 and not its definition.

Setting the record straight

What is Web 2.0. We define it by what the web provides us with, what the web can do for us and how we can use it at that state/version.

So you can define Web 2.0 as a more open, social and interactive state of the web that exceeds the previous possibilities of Web 1.0. Moving away from static marketing sites for business into applications and tools for social interaction, opinion voicing and open education… for everyone.

Wiktionary has a some-what solid and verified definition of what Web 2.0 is. Do we need to define what version the web is at? Of course not, its not an application we get service updates for… hell it hasn’t really changed since it went mainstream in the early 90’s, thankfully design on the web has changed.

If I see a website designer that says “I can make Web 2.0″ relating to design then… well… I’ll get angry

Just a note: I appologise to any typographers. I had to use double single-quotes in the title because normal quotes wouldn’t work. It’s Kryptonite… I know.

Trying to be Twitter

The first thing noticeable about the design is its resemblance to Twitter. From the familiar story list layout to the similar sized thumbnail avatars. This is just blatantly Facebook trying to be Twitter OR they are running out of ideas. One interesting excerpt maybe proving an intentional design is what I found on their response to the thousands, maybe millions, of hate emails about the new design:

With the recent home page changes, we’re trying to present the right balance between what’s happening right now and what’s interesting over a longer period of time. We realize that both are important and getting them both right is crucial for the product to work. In the last few weeks, you’ve seen us shift the main emphasis towards real-time conversations and updates as the entry point to Facebook. We’re working hard to make this stream more valuable, and also to build out the richness and relevance of the Highlights section.

Now in my opinion (IMO) Facebook isn’t for “what’s happening right now” rather it should be a central profile hub and keeping up with friends in a long-term basis. What I think Facebook has done is forget what they are actually doing. Having an up-to-date to the second status feed of all your friends is nice but its not exactly new. What I want Facebook to do is make itself a platform for cross-authentication and profile sharing on the web. Facebook Connect is the right direction, live status-wall-feed-thingy updates isn’t, leave that to Twitter, they have rightfully claimed that concept.
In a blog post by Facebook showing off the new design pre-launch Jolene Freeland Erola said:

If I wanted Twitter Id sign up for it!!!

That about sums it up.

Everything on one page, check!

The home page is the worst design it has ever been. The mix of the new wall with the social sidebars is just too overpowering, displaying to much information at a time. If they are trying to be Twitter then they missed one major part, simplicity. I even get confused what’s an Ad or not because generally the right sidebar has always, and still is on some pages, just for advertisements. So I don’t look at the right sidebar and it makes whatever is cluttered there a waste of space.

Why the change, again?

I don’t know for sure, something maybe only “Zucks” knows. It could be that he doesn’t want to pay a web design team just to faff about while the current design simmers.

But if they didnt keep up and fresh it would just turn into what MySpace is, I really extremely hate MySpace by the way. Keeping Facebook fresh and new doesn’t mean they have to change the page layout and skeleton all the time. They just need to focus on new core features of Facebook and target an area where they can kill it, not stealing other website’s features.

If anyone knows why they changed apart from their predictable BS in the blog posts, comment it up! Or any humorous reasons, I do like a good laugh.

What they should do to fix this mess

Straight back to the old design for the home page. But for the long run here’s a little list of what they should do to fix this and aim their hours at:

• Listen to their users, if its rubbish then maybe its time to re-evaluate the design. They are using it after all.
• Being new and fresh for website tech is all well and good but if your not a web designer then it can be confusing.
• Look at extending and improving the core of Facebook (social mapping) and further improve what they already have.

Just like the Terms of Use agreement they should claim they messed up and back flip on it.

To read the blog posts on Facebook relating to the new design here are the links:

Welcome to your new Home Fail page
Responding to your feedback

Same thoughts about the new design? Let me know.

Photo by f-l-e-x

The next best thing for web designers and developers is the advent of HTML5. The next revision of the HyperText Mark-up Language is going to change the way websites are made and how they interact with the user. Including advancements in the structure of the code, interactivity with the user and browser and accessibility possibilities for the disabled. It’s going to shoot the web into another dimension, not literally.

Simpsons Movie, Copyright © 20th Century Fox

The next step is the “Semantic Web” which is a word that has been thrown around by some web futurists describing the next step, Web 3.0 if you want. Simply, the browser and computer will do more than just render the HTML it can read the page and scan it for information and indexing it locally to make use of functions that can make the browsing experience better than it has been. But its not only the ability of machine based interaction with websites that makes HTML5 better.

HTML5, whats different?

HTML5 will include a new structure for coding a page. HTML4 has become a bit backwards for designers because there are now common methods for creating a site which include the use of Division (<div>) tags as a wrapper and defining sidebars and so on. With HTML5 it has dedicated tags for Headers, Footers, Navigation and Sidebars meaning its 1 tag to do the job instead of 2 or more.

A List Apart has a fantastic post with examples of HTML 5 which I highly recommend to check it out if you are interested in exploring the structure.

HTML5 Structure, from A List Apart Article

As you can see from the example on the left, the structure has very clear and concise tags.

Initially I thought, and you may as well, that having these dedicated tags will limit what we can do and create a standard design. Yes and No. Some sites may have the same old wireframe look to them but it’s more flexible than what you may initially think. It really depends how “wild” your design ideas are and if you put those ideas into affect. If you can’t be arsed then of course it will blend in to the crowd but that’s the designers choice.

Better media playback, yay!

HTML5 also includes new media tags for video and audio which can be used in the site. Before you yell about why we never use background music on websites… its not used for that. Sharing multimedia like videos on websites can be a bit trickier than just plopping a link on a page. If you want it to display inline then you need to use a player, which will probably be Flash and made by the website that is streaming the media.

But what if your browser had an inbuilt default player that would get the link in the <video> tag and load it up. The days of Flash crashing browsers because its dumb and stupid will be long gone and the browser will be able to use a player that it knows will work. That’s what HTML5 will bring to the multimedia scene and will make the web an easier and less Flash-crash-y

Big plus, Accessibility.

Another plus for HTML5 will be the ease of accessibility for the disabled. For example, a screen reader for the blind can be given a command (maybe verbal) to list the navigation on a page. With HTML5 all it has to do is find the <nav> tag and read out the items. Simple! It will give the disabled a web that is more accessible to them than it ever has been before. Further examples could be a default style to a page for the motor impaired so that the clickable areas are large and content is easy to use and interact with. Just looking into the benefits of HTML5 for the disabled and impaired makes me feel that the future of the web with HTML5 is going to be mind blowing. The possibilities for plugins, addons and better user interaction will blow away anything HTML4 can do.

For more information on HTML and interesting articles see the links below:

• W3C Spec for HTML5
• A List Apart article on HTML5
• W3School HTML5 Reference

The Scenario

A few months ago I had a bright idea for a cool new web application that was on my list to do. So I went on a domain search and I used GoDaddy to check out if it was free. It was so I went and did some research and design mockups before I made a strong commitment. That’s where I went wrong and where I found out about GoDaddy’s evil plan.

When you search for a domain to see if its available not only is it checked to be free but it is also logged in a database. You can tell so because in the URL bar the search generates an ID number which means it has a record stored somewhere. Nothings wrong with that but after you have found a great domain free you should probably buy it on the spot. A GoDaddy employee will be checking a list of domains that showed as free and may nab it before you can.

This is how I proved it. In my notebook, paper not a laptop, I had a page where I was jotting down notes for this web app. I usually put a title at the top of the page and a date for future reference. I checked a few domains on the list I had on that page on GoDaddy and the one I liked the most was free. So after I was working on the back ideas, I know I should have bought it anyway, a few weeks later it was registered. The nature of the domain was obscure and wouldn’t be anything I would think would be usable so its not like it was bought by someone. The WhoIs shows that it was in fact purchased using GoDaddy and with WhoIs protection, nothing wrong with that. It’s the timeframe, verified by the date in my notebook and the date at the time, of the purchase and the research I did into it that alerted me to this scheme.

How to prove this yourself

How can this be proven? Well you can try it yourself, find a cool and available domain name then use the domain availability search on GoDaddy. Wait a few weeks or maybe a month and then check to see if its still available. Depending on how good the domain is and how attractive it would be to have it may be taken and if it is then you can do a WhoIs search on the domain. It will probably be bought by GoDaddy or a sub-company. GoDaddy may even have their own “This website is under construction” page with a billion advertisements on it.

Where this pisses me off and why I’ll never use GoDaddy again is because they have this feature if a domain is taken:

“Use a Domain Buy Agent to get this name” which means “We charge you more money to buy a domain we bought on purpose”. Also as a test lets see if any of those free domains for Angry Web Designer mysteriously get bought, .net may disappear but not by GoDaddy. The Domain Buy Agent will cost you another $59 upfront with a commission (minimum $10US)… So GoDaddy can literally name a price and then reap all the profits.

This is ridiculous because GoDaddy is purchasing domains as they please to gain profit from the people that want them. This practice, in my opinion, is a disgrace and goes against everything of what the Internet’s about. Freedom of speech and information regardless of geographic location, race or opinion you should be able to buy a domain without having it strategically squatted by a bloated domain registrar, any registrar for that matter. I can continue to rant here…but I wont.

If your using GoDaddy or are planning to, DONT! There are better registrars out there with the same or even better price. I use NameCheap because its quick and easy and, to my knowledge, wont steal domains from you.

Interesting posts related to shady GoDaddy activity:

Is GoDaddy a mass-cybersquatter? [The Legal Satyricon]
Who is monitoring your domain searches? [Daily Domainer]

Has this happened to you? Other domain registrars stealing domains from your search queries?

It’s boasted to have new and improved security and online personal security functionality (phishing and dangerous site notifications). It also now has, to be blunt, the PornMode called ‘InPrivate’ which will not remember anything you have visited for a session. Now that’s all well and good but compared to other browsers is catching up on last years features and is still the same cruddy IE.

Why to hate IE 8

Lets focus on what enrages me and no doubt the web designer community too. This single sentence from the Microsoft Developer Network (MSDN) describes why I hate IE with a passion:

Windows Internet Explorer 8 is planned to be a fully CSS Level 2.1-compliant browser, and will support some features of CSS 3.

Source: CSS Compatibility and Internet Explorer, MSDN

Now according to W3C the last revision of CSS Level 2 Revision 1 was posted on 19 July 2007, with the draft versions going back to 2002. CSS 2.1 is now 2 years (or 7, depends how you look at it) behind the new standard which is now CSS Level 3. They are trying to include some CSS 3 selectors but they are mainly the really basic selectors. Not including common (stuff we want to use) CSS 3 functions like border radius or the new background tiling styles where background tiles are more complex. Safari’s CSS animation stuff is amazing but I wouldn’t expect any other browser to be up to that yet. For a table of compatibility over all browsers see the QuirksMode website.

IBM PC image from befuddledsenses

Some people might think that IE8 is doing a good job but lets not forget where the Internet Explorer brand has put us today. IE 6 is still in use in a notable market share of Internet users and its old CSS capabilities and lack of any new and useful coding or rendering interfaces makes it a step back. If IE 6 was to vanish tomorrow what would the web evolve into? No doubt the restraints on Javascript and CSS will be unleashed without worrying about IE6 compatibility.

The problem with getting the users off of IE6 and onto IE8 or another browser can be brought down to laziness and a little fear that something might break. There is no real motivation to upgrade any IE browser because there is no real “You need to upgrade” notification like what Firefox and Safari have. Fear of breaking something (”ohh noes I broke the intarwebs!”) or just not understanding the “newfangled” web browser so the users just don’t upgrade.

Mediocre now to total shit box in a year

Lets look to 1 or 2 years from now, when I hope that IE6 is long dead. We will be stuck in the same situation but with IE8 instead of IE6. Other browsers like Safari and Firefox are on new and better things where IE8, which was released sub-par, will now be equivalent to the IE6 of now. Its just not right…

What I want to know is how can Microsoft with all of its “power” create a product that millions of people will use that is behind where the industry is at now. It’s not like its hard, Safari and Firefox have shown compatibility with CSS 3 and even HTML 5 in latest releases.

What can we do about it?

Well this is the part where we come to the “What can we do about it?”. Well there’s a few methods:

• Ban IE users from our websites (tempting)
• Charge Microsoft for the hours used to fix sites for IE 6+ (my favourite)
• Send a really nasty email to the IE8 Development team
• Public advertisements to switch to better browsers (plausible)

On this very site you’re on if you are using IE you will see a yellow banner at the top of the page urging you to switch. If you’re not on IE but want to see it either use a user agent swapper or use IE. That banner has a link to this page.

There are movements beginning in the cloud to bring down IE6. It’s getting the word out to the greater populous to upgrade to a faster, more compliant, safer and sexier web browser that’s not IE. The delivery mechanism for that message is the only thing left to work out.

Internet Explorer makes me furiously angry because it’s holding back what the web can be because it is behind in compaitibility and experience for the user. This can affect how visitors use our websites and their overall experience. It also enrages me because debugging Javascript is a freaking pain!

Do you feel this same anger and frustration?