Per Design

Updated design

Ben — Sat, 04 Oct 2008 02:19:47 +0000

A new design for my portfolio and a new design for the blog. This has been, unfortunately, too long in coming due to life, work, and a general laziness on my part. I think what finally drove me to finish it up and get the new designs online was a sense of exhaustion from the demands of work - I needed to do something different. Looking at my source code, in particular at my stylesheet for this WordPress theme, I’m sure you’ll note that I’ve done little for that headache of a browser that is Internet Explorer 6. The reasons are quite simple - I wanted to do something beyond catering to the lowest common denominator, something I didn’t have to make design compromises for and also something that could explore the capabilities of modern browsers. I know I’ll probably be revisiting the WordPress theme, as right now it’s a tad to “minimalist” to my taste. Although in webkit-powered browsers you’ll find some nice subtle goodies.

But enough for now. Does it work? Anything messed up and needing fixing? Let me know about it in the comments.

Bandwidth and technology constraints

Ben — Sat, 20 Sep 2008 01:52:46 +0000

I have an interesting design “problem” I’m working on. A client wants a new website. They would like it to become a useful and usable resource. The target audience for this site come from rural or economically-challenged demographics. So bandwidth and old technology constraints are real issues that need to be addressed by the design. Quite an interesting challenge in that regard. The client however seems to really want to use Flash - mainly just to rotate some imagery around. In other words, it serves no useful purpose other then decoration. Normally that would be fine, but considering the target audience and the constraints we’re dealing with, I don’t think it makes a lot of sense to add Flash. What do you think?

Update: So the after some discussion, the client decided to do go ahead with Flash movie, understanding that perhaps some of the target audience would not see it or have an optimal experience with it. The client did reduce the amount of images that the Flash movie uses, which reduced the file size some 100 Kb which is good.

Firefox 3 woes

Ben — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 01:43:55 +0000

This is more of a “anyone know what might be the problem?” post. I recently tried upgrading to Firefox 3 on my laptop, a 2006 MacBook Pro. The problem is that I can’t start Firefox. It continually crashes. Even in safe-mode. I even tried removing my old Firefox user profiles and starting with a new one. Still no go. So is anyone aware of why Firefox 3 continues to crash? Anyone have any tips on how to troubleshoot this?

*Update*: I just recently moved to using my laptop as my primary machine (~90%). To do this I used the excellent Migration Assistant. I basically overwrote my hardly-used user account on my laptop with my desktop’s user account. But I hadn’t upgraded to Firefox3 on the laptop wheras I had on my desktop. And it turns out Firefox 2 user accounts are not compatible with 3, thus causing much crashing and never starting after I tried to update Firefox on my laptop! So I just logged into my old desktop and copied over all the ~/username/Library/Application Support/Firefox files to my laptop into the proper location. And everything now works.

Communication between 3 parties

Ben — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 19:57:31 +0000

In the midst of a website redesign project, I sent an email to the client outlining several issues I was currently grappling with in the design and some of my feedback on some of the client’s feedback on previous design iterations. This email outlined the problems and suggested solutions and sought client feedback on these issues. No images or comps were provided, mainly because I wasn’t comfortable with the state the design was currently in. I naturally cc’d my supervisor, who is also managing this project.

The manager was at first upset and worried. They construed my email remarks as suggesting that I was entirely opposed to the client’s feedback, and they worried that without images to show what I was talking about, the client would get confused, and they now wanted all communication with the client to be cleared with them first.

After hearing the manager explain their concerns, I saw where they were coming from and could indeed see how my email message could be improperly interpreted or confusing. I then explained where my email was coming from. This definitely helped the manager see I was not sending this message off half-cocked. But to ensure that the message was more clearly conveyed and that no damage was done, we had a conference call with the client to go over the issues detailed in my email. It turns out the client took my email the way I intended (whew!)

The big lesson from this experience:

Emails still leave room for miscommunication where verbal or in-person communication can reduce those possibilities. After talking with the manager, we resolved our differences in what they percieved and what I actually meant in the email and the conference call with the client made sure that the proper message was communicated. The more humans involved, the more possibility for communication issues.

3 wonderful years

Ben — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 19:49:14 +0000

This last Wednesday my wife and I celebrated a wonderful 3 years of marriage. Looking forward to many more.

Photo taken on our aniversery