The Mill apartments, Ballisodare. Incredible photos of an abandoned apartment building. Each photo is contrasted with descriptions from the brochure pitching the place in 2006. (via Kevin Conboy)
Month: May 2011
Challenging Traditional WordPress Design
Catherine Winters had the second session in the afternoon UX track. She talked about how to expand our conception of what a WordPress site is.
“Oftentimes many of us can tell, at a glance, when a site is using WordPress.” It’s the ones that surprise us that make things interesting. What is good for a blog is not necessarily best for other sites.
The assumption is that people making websites already know what they’re doing. This isn’t necessarily true. Elements taken as a given on a blog (sidebar archives, blogroll, etc.) should be reconsidered. Many times they aren’t necessary to the overall functioning of the design.
Catherine argues that we should try to limit things in sites that are necessary to the site itself. By doing this we’ll be able to avoid what Jakob Nielsen refers to as banner blindness.
She points out that “The blog post is the pitch.” The content of a site is what people will stick around for. Badges and widgets in the sidebar distract from this central purpose.
Similarly, page navigation and forcing users to click-through to see full content only creates a drop in the percentage of users who do stick around to read things.
Looking to the design of apps like Readability or Instapaper that are centered around reading can serve as effective guides for sites. She also pointed to Dustin Curtis and Jason Santa Maria as examples of effective content design and direction.
Others, like the ADDitude site that Catherine mentioned are examples of all the things to avoid. 9 column grids with busy design that provides no sense of hierarchy just overwhelm us.
wp-Typography was also mentioned as a way to align a site with basic typographical principles. This provides some basic tools for hyphenation, bullets, and other typographical tools.
Status
Upgraded to WordPress trunk today. The new admin Dashboard and fullscreen writing mode are wonderful updates.
Making Custom Theme Options Easy
Toby Mckes, a WordPress developer at I Can Has Cheezburber, gave the second talk at WordCamp Developers on the theme options panels their sites use. CheezCAP is the custom theme options panel they’ve open sourced.
Cheezburger runs over 50 sites on WordPress.com VIP. CheezCAP, which stands for Cheezburger Custom Administration Panel, makes their deployment process for themes really simple.
Background
The internet is a series of tubes filled with cats. Toby started on the farm team at Cheezburber where they were putting out many sites every week. The goal was “OMG moar sites plz.”
Their initial theme deployment process was terrible. Toby had to spend half his time as a server admin. On Thanksgiving 2009 one of their sites was posted to the Guardian UK and hit 700,000 pageviews. He got to spend his Thanksgiving rebooting the server.
They also didn’t have version control. There was no way of tracking what was being changed and many sites were hacked together to the point of looking pretty bad. It was easy to make new sites but difficult to update and maintain them. They switched to a unified theme on WordPress.com.
Early on they had 10 sites running this unified theme and one file which contained all of the customization options for the sites. CheezCAP was the solution to make this easier.
CheezCAP
Licensed under the GPL v2 CheezCAP adds an options panel to make customization easy. There’s a pre-configured config file that you can customize to your liking. Its core contains a few key aspects:
- Boolean options create as basic toggle switches.
- Text options can represent alphanumeric strings to be inserted.
- Dropdown options serve as more complex options.
- User caps to limit editing ability to specific user roles.
All of this goes right into your Dashboard and lets you get new sites set up and running with custom options that require minor configuration changes. Google Analytics integration, A/B testing, custom 404 pages, and much more can all be configured with CheezCAP.
The killer feature of all this is import/export. All of these options can be exported from one site and seamlessly imported into a new site. Setting up development sites is super easy using this.
Update: Toby gave a similar talk at WordCamp Seattle and will be updating the slides from that talk.
HTML5 and CSS3 with WordPress
Ray Villalobos, who flew all the way out from Florida, opened the development track at WordCamp Developers with a talk about HTML5, CSS3, and WordPress integration. He posted his slides before the talk as well.
Ray is an author at Lynda.com and runs a course on iOS 4 and web applications. The WordCamp presentation grew out of this course. He works for Entravision Orlando full-time, which manages many Univision stations.
The talk covered core HTML5 and CSS3 concepts and how they can be implemented into your WordPress development.
Core concepts
Ray described HTML5 as a bit of a rebellion against XHTML 2.0. In other words, “XHTML 1.1 makes humans code like machines.” With its flexible parsing rules, support of existing code structure, and common tags HTML5 respects users, browsers, and lets people write code in a more fluid manner.
HTML5 brings support for semantic elements (header, footer, asides, etc.) along with rich media and new form elements.
The semantic tags in HTML5 were created by analyzing the tags people were already using in their markup. The goal was to make things easier and provide for more rapid prototyping.
CSS3
Mobile browsers have great support for CSS3. Mobile app development allows for more universal support of both CSS3 and HTML5.
Ray warned to be careful when using gradients, custom fonts, transformations, and animations. Browser support for these elements can be dicey and relying on any of them for mission critical features isn’t a great idea.
One of the cool things with CSS3 is the media queries that allow for responsively designed sites. Ethan Marcotte also wrote a stellar article at A List Apart on media queries in May of last year.
Before adding new elements from HTML5 or CSS3 Ray cautions to look at your target platforms. Analyzing your site metrics will give you a better idea of what browsers your users are on. This helps you determine where to add enhancements and how vital it is to provide alternative versions.
To add support for semantic selectors in Internet Explorer and other browsers that don’t natively support them Ray suggested using html5shim or Modernizr.
Ray recommended Browser Labs from Adobe to test sites in multiple browsers side-by-side. It’s free right now but will eventually be a paid tool.
Using cache manifests and .htaccess rules you can easily set up offline storage of files on devices. These provide a great way to store images and other data for use in offline or airplane modes.
Status
Up in Vancouver today for WordCamp Developers. Getting ready to watch the keynote interview with Lorelle and Nacin.
Somewhere North of Seattle
Traveling up to WordCamp Developers and snapped this somewhere north of Seattle.
It’s an 8 hour train ride from Portland but taking Amtrak seriously beats flying. Power outlets, great leg room, and no security or liquids to hassle with.
Khoi Vinh on columns
What they’re arguing though is that columnized text makes it easier for the designer, gives them an added level of control over the design through which they can exercise their own prerogatives. It’s not an argument for optimizing the user experience; it’s an argument for optimizing the designer’s experience.
Khoi Vinh – My Column on Columns.
Death of Osama bin Laden. Wikipedia contributors once again nail how to create a topical landing page for a breaking news event. 136 citations as of this posting. Seriously impressive.