Around the Common is a community blog about my town of Bridgewater, Massachusetts. I recently did a redesign of the site, replacing the default Blogger template with a custom site design. The new design gives the site its own individual look, rather than just be another generic Blogger-powered blog. The almost-daily updates of what’s going on in the town still remains front and center, clearly the focus and easily read on the white background.
Around the Common original site
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The old links sidebar, which scrolled for many screens, has been split into two sidebars of logically grouped items: The center column contains town-specific links (government, community, business, and political sites) and the right column is blog-specific content (about the site, RSS feed, Google ads, “Best of Bridgewater” site poll winners, and the archives). The ads, originally buried in the bottom of the sidebar in the old site, now are more easily seen, yet still remain unobtrusive and blend nicely with the site’s colors.
You can visit Around the Common and find out what’s going on in Bridgewater.
In general, I really dislike Flash when building websites. But one bit of Flash technology that I use somewhat regularly is sIFR (which, if you’re curious, stands for Scalable Inman Flash Replacement).
What is sIFR? Basically it’s code that replaces plain HTML text on a web page with a small Flash movie that displays the text in any typeface you want. It works on any major browser with the Flash plug-in (which is nearly all web users) and sIFR degrades gracefully for the few that don’t, displaying the plain HTML text instead of the Flash text.
sIFR has been a great way for me to add style and personality to an otherwise all-HTML-text website. For sites I’ve built on a CMS — like barbarapeavey.com, craigrousseau.com and kieranchapmandesign.com — sIFR takes the site-owner-generated page titles and displays them in the selected typeface. This is such a timesaver over having to create or edit title images each time a change is made.
Alas, sIFR isn’t perfect: It’s use is pretty much limited to titles and subtitles; using it for body text would slow things down too much. Already it does slow down page load times a bit, as the page needs to first load before the Flash displays the title text. Also, while I’ve implemented it a number of times, it’s still not the easiest technology to get running correctly on a site. Besides setting up the script and styles, there’s often quirks and tweaking to get text to display correctly.
Until we’re given proper control over type on the web — perhaps TypeKit will be the answer? — sIFR has been a very good stopgap solution. For more information, as well as downloads, examples and documentation, check out sIFR Documentation & FAQ.
Design is much more than simply making things look pretty. A “fresh coat of paint” won’t help you if the overall usability and usefulness of your website or product is flawed.
However, making things look attractive is an important part of design. A website’s visual design not only conveys the personality of your company through its style, typography, and color, but it’s also how people determine if they can trust your site. The same way you wouldn’t go into a messy, dirty, run-down store, you probably wouldn’t shop online at an amateur-looking, disorganized website with missing photos and broken links.
A List Apart’s article In Defense of Eye Candy discusses many of these topics. It also brings up Donald Norman’s tests when he looked to answer the question “Do attractive products actually work better?”
Researchers in Japan setup two ATMs, “identical in function, the number of buttons, and how they worked.” The only difference was that one machine’s buttons and screens were arranged more attractively than the other. In both Japan and Israel (where this study was repeated) researchers observed that subjects encountered fewer difficulties with the more attractive machine. The attractive machine actually worked better.
Your site’s design is important to your customers on many levels: how they perceive your company, whether they can trust you, and even how successful they are at using your site. The design of your website or product should not be an afterthought. Good design needs to be an integral part of your company, otherwise it’s probably costing you customers.
lipsum.com is a site I often use to generate dummy text for use in designs and wireframes. It allows you to specify a certain number of paragraphs, words, and list items, if you need a specific amount of text. Also, if you’ve ever wondered where “lorem ipsum dolor sit amet” came from, the site also has a little history behind it as well.
I re-launched the site for oil painter Barbara Peavey this weekend. I switched from my custom content management system I built with PHP and MySQL — which did the job well — to an “artist website” package I built using Quick.CMS. (Other sites built on the artist site are Leanne Hannah’s and Craig Rousseau’s.)
If you’re an artist in need of a custom website, please contact me.
Posted in CMS, Releases |
It looks like I’ve learned my first lesson with WordPress: when upgrading, proceed with caution! A recent upgrade for NextGEN Gallery plug-in, which powers the Portfolio page and part of the home page, caused it to fail: I had no screenshots showing up at all.
Luckily, the fix turned out to be an easy one (I needed to re-upload my custom template files, which were deleted with the upgrade). But from now on I’ll proceed with caution before clicking any automatic “update” link.
Posted in CMS, Development |
Part of the delay with launching this site was the platform it’s built on: I’ve been wanting to learn WordPress, both as a blogging tool and for general site content management, and this was a good excuse to do it. I’ve been hand-coding my personal sites since I learned HTML (I’ve never been satisfied with the code WYSIWYG editors generate) so this was quite a change for me. And since I didn’t want to use a generic WordPress theme, there was a big learning curve figuring out how to customize the templates to do what I want.
Rather than start from scratch, I did some research and decided to use the Thematic Theme Framework, a simple but easy-to-customize WordPress template. I still had to do a bunch of custom PHP work and there’s too much unnecessary code under the hood, but overall I’m happy with the result. Thematic let me get up and running relatively quickly, and so far I’ve been satisfied with WordPress.
The other bit of learning was with the NextGEN Gallery plug-in. It’s a very powerful and easily customized photo gallery plug-in for WordPress, and I’m using it to display the portfolio images on the site. Finally, I used Header Image Rotator Pro for the main image on the home page.
Eventually I’ll get the templates and code cleaned up the way I like it, but for now I’m happy to have a site that easy to update.
Posted in CMS, Development |
After being in business for almost a year, this new site was long overdue. Much like the carpenter who never has time to fix up his own house, I’ve (happily) been too busy with clients to update Kieran Chapman Design beyond my initial one-page site.
One addition to the site is this blog. I’ve had a personal blog since 2001, but this will be focused on work: current projects, design, usability, tools I use, useful sites, and the like. But I’ll still keep my Red Sox ramblings and Flickr photos on my personal site.
So welcome to the new site, have a look around, and if you’d like to discuss a design project please feel free to contact me.
Posted in KCD, Releases |
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