Yesterday gmail went out for about an hour and a half. Not terribly bad for any Internet application, but I don’t recommend gmail for my clients. Not for that reason, but if you are in business, with the low price of a domain name and small hosting hosting account there is no reason to have an email account with someone else’s name on it. So MyName@MyBusiness.com is always better than AnyName@gmail.com (or Yahoo.com, Verizon.com, Comcast.com, etc.)
Despite what I say many people will still use gmail and the others for business email. What I learned from this is that while their web interface went down folks that had POP or IMAP access to gmail still were able to use it. So if you don’t know what IMAP or POP email access is, you should learn and if you don’t have it you should add it.
The reason that I’m writing this post today is not because of what happened, we all know shit happens, but because of the way Google handled the situation. As you probably know the social world was buzzing with all kind of Tweets, facebook, LinkedIn posts and news stories about the outage. People were already asking “what’s the best service to switch to?” I’ll admit it’s more than a bit extreme, but still it’s a situation that’s needs dealing with quickly and decisively. Google did just that.
- First they admitted there was a problem and apologized right away. You might say that’s a given, but it amazes me how many companies miss or ignore that step.
- Second they explained exactly what went wrong. This was an issue that was fairly technical and they explained it in a simple and clear way that almost anyone could understand.
- Third they let their customers know what they would be doing to ensure that this won’t happen again.
All in all it’s the right way to diffuse a bad situation before it gets ugly.
I have a category with some of my favorite site designs that are showing up on the web. These are not my sites, but they are the kinds of designs that I like in a website. There are different reasons that I picked these site designs, they all look good and are clear and easy to use. Sometimes I just like a picture or the name. Some of the sites are not in English and I still know what they are about.
The newest one is called The Color Cure.
They are a small creative team based in the Philippines. They have a great site. Clear, easy to read and I just love their menu. A cool simple idea that I haven’t really seen before.
I am currently working with a customer who wants to set up a store. They had a spreadsheet of the items that they want to sell. There are over 3,000 of them. Creating a database if items for a shopping cart is not that unusual, but in this case the item images were in the spreadsheet as a URL on the vendors website.
I didn’t want to hot link the images because there can be all sort of problems with that, so I needed to download and shrink most of them to a usable size. So for 3,100 images and thumbnails for each I was looking at over 6,200 images. No small task.
I did quite a bit of research and tried out several of each kind and I discovered two programs that I want to recommend here today.
First Free Download Manager, as the name says is free (and open source another plus) and designed to do much more than what I needed it to do. Free Download Manager allows you to: adjust traffic usage; to organize and schedule downloads; download video from video sites; download whole web sites with HTML Spider; operate the program remotely, via the internet, and more! It allowed me do save over 6,200 images in under two hours.
Next I needed to resize these images to fit in the cart so they wouldn’t crowd out the description or force things off the page. BIMP Lite came to my rescue. BIMP Lite is a small and simple batch processor for image files, that allows you to perform various functions on multiple images. BIMP is not open source, but it’s 100% FREE and contains no spyware, adware or nagware. It also does much more than resize, you can add many other image and file name operations.
A couple of great programs that I highly recommend.
The other day I wrote about how I sometimes find myself trying to talk a client out of doing something one way or another. Some of those times my client will decide to do things their way. I will then do what the customer wants because they are the customer and they know their customers better than I do.
Sometimes it works out well and sometimes not so well. Yesterday I read a post on the Wilson Ellis Consulting blog called Are Your Personal Preferences Costing You Money? They wrote about almost the same thing. It’s really impossible to know what will work for a site and what won’t, unless you try everything and thoroughly test your results.
It never ceases to amaze me how many people want the latest and greatest technology, regardless if they have any idea how to use it or what it can actually do for them.
It’s also very true with websites. I can’t tell you how many sites that I’ve built with programs for things that were hardly ever used, if at all. There’s also no telling how many visitors that the latest bell or whistle confused and chased away.
As a website designer I work for the site owner and so first I give my opinion of the value for any addition to their site. I’ll hope that they’ve thought long and hard about if they really need the very latest “must have” gadget. Hopefully they will have taken some time to decide if it will actually help their site’s goals before they add it. After that, I’ll do what they want.
There are many other designers who will just say to their customers “sure thing, that’s a great idea” and close their eyes and see their bill going up.
Here’s another good post on the subject from Joshua Palau on the Search Engine Watch called…
I have a category with some of my favorite site designs that are showing up on the web. These are not my sites, but they are the kinds of designs that I like in a website. There are different reasons that I picked these site designs, they all look good, are clear and easy to use. Sometimes I just like a picture or the name. Some of the sites are not in English and I still know what they’re about.
The newest one is called Innespace Seabreacher. Their site is plain, simple and since it only really has one product, it’s front and center. The navigation is simple, easy to find and identify. There is a nice hover effect that lets you know for sure that they are links.
It also helps that they have a super cool product to sell, an exciting personal submersible watercraft that looks and acts like a dolphin.
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I have a page on my site with some of my favorite site designs that are showing up on the web. These are not my sites, but they are the kinds of designs that I like in a website. There are different reasons that I picked these site designs, they all look good and are clear and easy to use. Sometimes I just like a picture or the name. Some of the sites are not in English and I still know what they are about.
The newest one is called Pickupalooza
This is a very simple site to help people find pickup games and activities in their area. It’s just here in Pittsburgh for now, but it’s a great idea and I think will catch on all over.
The site is very simple, but it looks great as well. It’s simple, clean, easy to navigate and understand. What more would you want?
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I have a page on my site with some of my favorite site designs that are showing up on the web. These are not my sites, but they are the kinds of designs that I like in a website. There are different reasons that I picked these site designs, they all look good and are clear and easy to use. Sometimes I just like a picture or the name. Some of the sites are not in English and I still know what they are about.
The newest one is called Eva Solo.
How much more simple can you get?
This site showcases their salad spinner product in a clean, simple and elegant manor. What more do I need to say?
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I have a page on my site with some of my favorite site designs that are showing up on the web. These are not my sites, but they are the kinds of designs that I like in a website. There are different reasons that I picked these site designs, they all look good and are clear and easy to use. Sometimes I just like a picture or the name. Some of the sites are not in English and I still know what they are about.
The newest one is called Small White Bear.
It’s a site about climate change, polar bears and why you should care! It’s a very simple site, nice rounded corners give it a smooth look and there’s plenty of space between the letters and words to make it easy to read and understand.
The site makes their point very well.
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Once a year is CSS Naked Day. Even though this it the fourth annual Naked Day, I have considered it, but chickened out the last three years. This year I have removed all CSS from this website, stripping it entirely of its design.
The idea behind this event is to promote Web Standards. Plain and simple. This includes proper use of (x)html, semantic markup, a good hierarchy structure, and of course, a good ‘ol play on words. It’s time to show off my <body>.
This is a fun idea, fully in line with the reasons for creating CSS in the first place. While most designers are attracted by the extra presentational capabilities, saving HTML from becoming a presentational language was probably a more important motivation for most people who participated in the beginning. CSS Naked Day is a way to promote web standards by showing your site is (x)html compliant and structured correctly.
Hopefully I’ll be able to get all my pages back to normal tomorrow.
