We designer types are a finicky breed. Rarely is something just right and we don’t really like the words time and budget. Good work takes time, a lot of it. That being said, when I launched version 2.0 of eleven3.com I was really excited, I felt I had achieved good work. I’m not sure if it’s just me, or if other designers do this as well, but when I design something I like; I stare and stare and stare.

With any creative work, the longer you expose yourself to it, the more stale it becomes. That’s why, about three months ago, I got the itch to redesign my site.

So here we are, one year ago and change I launched version 2.0 of eleven3. Today I launch version 3.0 - and yes I am just as excited as my last redesign. There are a lot of reasons for my excitement, but mainly it’s just a new look, a new focus, and more flexibility. Gone is the rigid and closed-source Movable Type and arriving is the flexible, fluid, Wordpress.

Continue reading for the off chance of relating to the requirements of the relaunch, the design phase, the challenges of coding the front-end, and the use of Wordpress and a plethora of plugins that now make up the site. A lot of work went into it, my hopes are that it is well received. Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 74% [?]

Me!

I had a colleague ask me about this site, asking if it was mine. While I do live in Portland, I do love CSS, I am shocked that Google would bestow this honor upon me. And as James Hall, a CSS guru from The Good Harvest, told me, blogging about the fact I am known for Portland and CSS will make my Google Search ranking even stronger for those terms!

So here I am. Feeling fancy! Indulge me in my narcissism and run a search for portland and css. Oh happy joy day.

Ok, back to the code.

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Update: Ok, no longer number one, stupid Google! That lasted all of 20 minutes.

Popularity: 20% [?]

Campaign Monitor has a good post about the the new Outlook 2007 rendering engine, Microsoft Word. For some reason Microsoft has made this move and once again it’s a slap in the face to the tech saavy people who work with their products. It’s unbelievable they haven’t figured out the connection between the geeks and the public. I know my anti-Microsoft sentiment over the past few years over web-standards has not gone unnoticed by those within earshot.

How does that work? I grumble and complain, I tell folks some of the horror stories of Microsoft and how they’ve gotten too arrogant to adhere to the “hey let’s get on the same page” policies of the little guy. In doing so I have switched tons of people to Firefox. I remember when people would get joked on for using AOL as their web browser, the beginning of the end for AOL. I’m pushing that same concept amongst friends, oh you still use IE? And it’s pop-up blocker? And it’s anti-spam-phishing-spyware bundled package with activeX? It looks like we will see more gmail and thunderbird users out there. I hadn’t had any qualms about Outlook until now. Microsoft, stop pissing off the influencers!

Popularity: 11% [?]

Last night I went up to Seattle for a Seahawks game, which was a miserable defeat, but I had a chance to meet some good people. I have never met anyone that works at Microsoft, then suddenly last night, I meet two. While both individuals were very smart, as you have to be to work at Microsoft, I didn’t get the feeling they loved MS, it’s just where they work.

The gist of the conversation I remember, the rest was lost in a bit of a haze, so please forgive the generalizing without examples. Essentially what I got was this, yes, we work at Microsoft, there are some good things here, but Google/Firefox/Opensource/Apple/Web Standards are awesome! There is something troubling in this thought pattern.
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Popularity: 11% [?]

Internet Explorer 7 has me excited. Why? It isn’t the shiny new UI which has folks asking, “where did my buttons go?” It is the PNG Support! No longer will I have to litter my CSS with IE hacks to get them working. I know CSS well enough to avoid the usual Internet Explorer pitfalls, but I still have * html … for PNGs.

I’m wondering when it will be ok to drop the PNG hack entirely and tell people if they want to see the sites, upgrade to Internet Explorer 7 (or firefox). As I have still received complaints that sites don’t look good on Internet Explorer 5.5 on a Mac, it will probably be awhile.

For those who don’t know the hack it looks a little like this:
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Popularity: 10% [?]

One of the really cool things about this latest web boom (I think I shall coin it web 2.0 (-; ) is RSS feeds. Granted they have been around much longer than all of this new stuff, but they have really started maturing over the last two years or so. The ability for any jackass, such as myself, to create a flickr or youtube account and subscribe to that data is totally awesome.

To take it one step further, we can also take sed RSS feed and pull it into our own blogs/sites. Kind of like the homepage of this site. What one sees is the parsing of three RSS feeds, one for del.icio.us, flickr, and last.fm.

I added those on there because I wanted all the time I spend doing other things on the web to reflect on my blog. Yet, in doing so, I ALMOST had to sacrifice something else that was very important to me. Standards.
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Popularity: 13% [?]

As guilty as I am of pasting these at the bottom of my sites, I think they will probably be similar to the Netscape Now buttons of the early web. It’s kinda like repping your hometown or team or whatever. Yes we rep XHTML/CSS because we all believe it’s the right thing to do; we know it is the right thing.

In my last post I talked about the entry fee for getting a job at my company required being up to par on web standards. Yes, we recommend one uses firefox with the web developer toolbar as well. Oh and there is also the useful Measure-It! extension. With all of these tools in one’s pocket, the question becomes, why haven’t some people caught on?

Microsoft Internet Explorer. This would require an entry in itself.

Perhaps one day all sites will be coded in valid css/xhtml and the validation links at the bottom will seem innappropriate and unecessary. Either way, Microsoft has a lot of making up to do to those of us in the web space. Perhaps they could make their browser standards compliant, and make something as appropriate as validation links go away.

Or they will just be Microsoft, and we will have to fight the good fight for the long run. I hope they come around.

(Checking out IE7 soon, somewhere I saw a dual install for both IE6 and IE7, so what happens to my IETab extension??)

Popularity: 13% [?]

There are those folks out there who do great work, speak at panels, and have a loyal following of admirers. And then there are those who would like to be doing something similar, yet can’t seem to get the traffic they so desire.

Since the launch, of what James Hall defines as a “bloatfolio” (i believe he has a new one coming any day now), I have been engaged in a few practices that I believe are succesful traffic drivers to this site.

What follows is a list of what I have done to drive traffic. I was toying with the idea of making it a top ten list, but I think I will save my big top ten list for, “Top 10 reasons why I am the most amazing blogger on the internet” post. Ha! Anyhow…
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Popularity: 12% [?]

I am in the middle of a project where I am combining two sources of old school code, one really bad rat’s nest of code (that has gotten much better thanks to the counterpart who I am working with) and the other just remnants of the old school bad.

The reason I bring this up is the fact I am becoming a bit of a code snob. Ugly, sloppy code really grosses me out. There was some code pulled up on a projector today and I had to turn away. So when did this happen for me?

I was introduced to the wonderful world of CSS about two years ago now. Before that I was building sites like everyone else, tables and spacer gifs. I can completely understand the necessity of those means before CSS came along, but now I can’t bear to work like that. Seperating design and content is essential to get past any sort of design changes one has to a multipaged website.
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Popularity: 14% [?]

I had to jump through numerous hoops to get this site to be of strict compliance. I figured I would share to get some dialogue going about different techniques that others have used as well as my own.

Although this list is published, I may add more to it in the future, just because this stuff never ends.

Before the list though, I would like to thank Steve James over at epicunion for keeping me up to date on the good, the bad, and the ugly of web standards. Everytime I think I can teach him something, he ends up teaching me.

Please comment on this post if you have any feelings towards any of it.
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Popularity: 9% [?]